A Little Of Nothing

Category: Random Musings

  • The Slow Creep of Autistic Burnout

    The Slow Creep of Autistic Burnout

    One of the more irritating things about autistic burnout is that it rarely arrives with the theatrical flourish I imagine. There is no dramatic collapse, no warning klaxon, and no helpful message from my brain politely informing me that I’m running critically low on mental resources and should pull over at the next convenient lay-by for a recharge. That would be far too convenient. Instead, burnout usually sneaks up on me.

    It’s less like falling off a cliff and more like gradually walking into the sea. I don’t notice the water reaching my ankles because I’m too busy concentrating on the horizon. Then the water is up to my waist and I’m still too busy focusing on my destination. Before I realise it, I’m out of my depth, floundering slightly, unable to feel the bottom, and wondering which direction the shore lies.

    My day involves a surprising amount of invisible effort. There’s the social masking, the “stage voice” I wrote about in my stammering article, filtering background noise, monitoring facial expressions, trying to remember whether I’ve made enough eye contact to appear interested without accidentally crossing into “slightly unsettling”, keeping track of conversations, and trying not to infodump about slide rules, cravats or my nihilistic theory of human existence. None of those things are particularly difficult in isolation, but together they’re like dozens of little computer programs quietly running in the background. Each one consumes a little memory, a little processing power, and a little battery until, eventually, I simply run out of something to give.

    I’ve started thinking about burnout less like stress and more like a battery. Most people notice when their phone reaches five per cent. My autistic battery has the remarkable ability to leap directly from sixty per cent to, “Why am I irrationally irritated because somebody stacked the dishwasher incorrectly?” Looking back, the warning signs are actually fairly obvious. The world seems louder than usual, conversations start feeling like hard work, and even simple questions such as “What do you fancy for dinner?” suddenly require the computational resources of a AI server farm. Eventually I reach the point where I no longer want to see or speak to anyone, not because I dislike people or because I’m depressed, but because my brain has quietly put a little sign on the door saying, “Capacity reached. Please call again tomorrow.”

    This is perhaps the biggest misconception about burnout. It isn’t laziness, a lack of motivation, or “not trying hard enough”. If anything, it usually arrives because I’ve been trying too hard for too long. I often picture it as carrying a rucksack while somebody quietly drops another pebble into it every day. One pebble isn’t a problem. Neither are ten, or fifty. The trouble is that one day I realise I’m carrying several thousand of the things and I’ve become so accustomed to the weight that I’ve forgotten life wasn’t always supposed to feel this heavy. That’s what burnout feels like to me. It isn’t one dramatic event. It’s the cumulative effect of hundreds of tiny demands, each insignificant on its own, quietly adding up until my brain eventually decides it’s had enough.

    The frustrating thing is that I already know what helps. The solutions are spectacularly uninteresting. More sleep. Less noise. Fewer demands. Time with people I trust. A walk somewhere green. Music. Noise-cancelling headphones. A mug of coffee. None of this is revolutionary, and none of it would sell many self-help books, but it works. The difficult part isn’t discovering the solution. The difficult part is giving myself permission to stop before my brain makes that decision on my behalf.

    At fifty-something I’ve become slightly better at recognising the warning signs. Not because I’ve become particularly wise, but because I’ve ignored them often enough to recognise the consequences. These days, if the world suddenly seems louder than usual, if every conversation feels like hard work, and if the thought of another Teams meeting fills me with existential dread, I know it probably isn’t the world that’s changed. It’s me. That’s usually my cue to slow down before my brain pulls the emergency brake and does it for me.

    Sadly, I do not always pull the emergency cord in time, and sometimes I get so overloaded that I am barely capable of leaving the house. The most banal tasks become Herculean, and routine things I do every day suddenly take on a distinctly Sisyphean quality until it all becomes, well, too much. I have been in that stage fairly recently. Instead I ignored the warnings, went on against my brain’s better judgement, and then promptly fell over. Naturally, I paid the price and am now trying to pick up the pieces. At least I noticed it fairly early in the burnout process and had not sunk too deeply into the depressive mire that can accompany it. I am still close enough to the edge to grab a low-hanging branch and haul myself back out. Muddied, exhausted but still in one piece.

    Perhaps the biggest lesson burnout has taught me is that being autistic or having ADHD isn’t just about the things other people notice. It’s also about the invisible effort that nobody sees. The conversations that looked effortless. The office that seemed manageable. The shopping trip that appeared uneventful. The social gathering everyone assumed I enjoyed. Sometimes my greatest achievement on any given day is convincing everyone else that I’m coping effortlessly. Burnout is often the bill arriving several weeks later.

    I’ve finally stopped thinking of myself as a machine that ought to run continuously. Batteries aren’t defective because they eventually need recharging, and neither am I. Every time I’ve ignored the warning signs and tried to keep going, my brain has eventually overruled me anyway. These days I try to recognise when my own battery is running low and quietly plug myself back into the charger before the screen goes completely black.

    Even if, occasionally, I don’t manage. At least I tried.

  • The Universe Doesn’t Give a **** About You!

    The Universe Doesn’t Give a **** About You!

    I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but the universe really doesn’t care a **** about you.

    It doesn’t care about your job, your bank balance, or the fact that Steve from Accounts got promoted ahead of you. It remains magnificently indifferent to all such concerns and, indeed, to most concerns in general. Entire stars explode with alarming regularity while I’m trying to remember where I left my reading glasses. The universe appears to regard these events as being of broadly equal insignificance.

    Oddly enough, I find that rather comforting.

    Many of us grow up with the idea that we’re here for a reason. Somewhere, hidden amongst the cosmic paperwork, there is supposedly a grand purpose waiting to be discovered. A destiny. A calling. Perhaps an ancient prophecy involving dramatic music, a glowing sword, and an unnecessarily complicated family tree.

    As far as I can tell, this is nonsense.

    You are not the chosen one.

    Neither am I.

    No great celestial bureaucrat sits above the clouds assigning each of us a special mission, a five-year plan, and an accompanying orchestral soundtrack. The universe has outsourced all personnel decisions and no longer answers correspondence.

    The good news is that if there is no grand cosmic plan for your life, then you cannot possibly fail to achieve it.

    You don’t have to become a billionaire (it’s trillionaires now – Ed) , a celebrity, a genius, or a historical footnote in order to justify your existence. You don’t need to leave a legacy, build an empire, or optimise your personal brand. Existing is not a performance review. There is no cosmic HR department quietly assessing your quarterly progress against strategic objectives.

    You are here.

    That is already enough. You already have worth and value.

    Of course, this brings us neatly to money.

    Now don’t get me wrong. Money is useful. Food, shelter, heating, books, bicycles, and the occasional cup of coffee all require money. The universe may be indifferent, but the electricity company certainly isn’t.

    Beyond a certain point, however, our relationship with money starts becoming a little strange. Financial security is sensible. Accumulating enough wealth to buy a small island, three yachts, and a solid-gold toilet while still worrying that you don’t have enough begins to resemble a dragon sleeping on a pile of treasure. Alas even some people on the planet at the moment would give Smaug a run for his money!

    At some point “more” stops meaning “enough” and starts meaning “because the spreadsheet said so”.

    That seems a very poor use of our limited time.

    Because time, not money, is the thing we’re actually running out of and no matter how much money you have… you cannot buy yourself more time.

    Here’s the great paradox.

    Cosmically speaking, we are insignificant. Ridiculously so. The observable universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Against that backdrop, the entire history of human civilisation barely registers as a rounding error.

    And yet there has never been another person exactly like you.

    There never will be again.

    The particular combination of memories, experiences, fears, hopes, talents, flaws, interests, favourite songs, terrible decisions, and peculiar habits that constitutes “you” has never existed before in the history of the universe. Every human being is both utterly insignificant and completely unique.

    The universe may not care.

    That doesn’t make you unimportant.

    It simply means your importance exists at a different scale.

    People spend an extraordinary amount of effort dividing themselves into tribes. Wealth. Religion. Nationality. Politics. Class. Social status. Favourite operating systems. Human beings seem unable to resist inventing categories and then arguing about them.

    Underneath all of that, however, we’re remarkably similar.

    We’re all temporary.

    We’re all fragile.

    We’re all making it up as we go along.

    We’re all trying to get through the week with some combination of dignity, optimism, caffeine, and luck.

    The labels we use to separate ourselves are often far less interesting than the things we share.

    Eventually every one of us will be gone.

    The kings.

    The billionaires. (Ahem trillionaires I said! – Ed)

    The influencers.

    The politicians.

    The people who spend all day arguing with strangers on the internet and who make “spreading hatred and misery” their mission.

    Especially them.

    One day the universe will forget every empire, every nation, every corporation, every social media platform, and every argument ever conducted online. Given enough time, all the works of mankind will vanish without trace. Even this great magnus opus you’re reading now will vanish (not a bad thing if you ask me – Ed)

    And honestly?

    That’s fine.

    I don’t find that depressing.

    I find it liberating.

    If our time here is brief and the universe has no grand plan for us, then we’re free to decide for ourselves what matters. We can learn interesting things. We can read good books. We can listen to great music. We can collect ridiculous objects. We can fall in love. We can build friendships. We can help one another where we can and, as a general rule, try not to make somebody else’s brief existence more difficult than it needs to be.

    We are all mayflies on a small rock hurtling through an indifferent cosmos.

    We may as well make the experience pleasant.

    So make the tea.

    Take the walk.

    Read the book.

    Listen to the music.

    Buy the absurd thing if it genuinely delights you and doesn’t bankrupt you.

    Laugh often.

    Be kind.

    Learn things.

    Share things.

    Help people.

    The universe doesn’t give a **** about you.

    Which is precisely why we should give a damn about each other.

  • Smell Is Basically a Superpower

    Smell Is Basically a Superpower

    People often ask me what it’s like not being able to smell.

    The honest answer is:

    I haven’t the faintest idea.

    If that sounds odd, then consider this: I’ve never experienced life with a sense of smell, so how can I possibly say what life is like without it?

    To me, smell occupies roughly the same category as telepathy, X-ray vision, and flying.

    I understand the theory.

    I simply have no frame of reference for the experience.

    What Exactly Is Congenital Anosmia?

    Put simply, anosmia is the lack of a sense of smell.

    Anosmia is to smell what blindness is to sight, or deafness is to hearing.

    Congenital means I was born this way.

    I didn’t lose my sense of smell later in life.

    I never had it in the first place.

    Technically, anosmia is the complete absence of smell. There is actually a spectrum of smell-related conditions, of which anosmia is just one.

    Anosmia

    The complete absence of any sense of smell.

    Hyposmia

    A reduced sense of smell. Think of it as turning the detection volume down.

    Phantosmia

    Smelling things that aren’t there.

    I hear this one can be pretty awful for sufferers.

    My brain obviously never generates imaginary smells. It has enough trouble detecting real ones.

    Parosmia

    Distorted smells.

    Coffee may smell like burning rubber. Perfume may smell acrid or unpleasant.

    Unfortunately, following COVID, cases of parosmia, hyposmia, and anosmia all became significantly more common.

    So now you know what the various smell disorders are.

    How is congenital anosmia different?

    You Can’t Miss What You Never Had

    Well, I’ve never had a sense of smell.

    Never experienced what smell is.

    To me, the sense of smell is effectively a fictional experience.

    Someone who acquires anosmia later in life, through illness, infection, head trauma, tumours, or simply old age, experiences a genuine sense of loss.

    They remember smell.

    They miss smell.

    They know what coffee smelled like.

    Freshly baked bread.

    Cut grass.

    Rain.

    Those memories remain even after the sense itself has gone.

    In some ways, being born without a sense of smell is easier.

    That may sound strange, but it really doesn’t bother me.

    That’s not to say it isn’t serious.

    Depression among people who lose their sense of smell later in life is sadly quite common.

    I do not envy them their memories.

    People often ask whether I feel I’ve missed out.

    It’s a bit like asking how I cope with losing £100 billion on the stock market.

    I haven’t lost £100 billion on the stock market.

    I never had £100 billion on the stock market.

    I’m aware that both smell and £100 billion exist.

    My emotional relationship with either is somewhat limited by their complete absence from my life.

    Smell as a Superpower

    I’ll tell someone I’m anosmic and can’t smell, and invariably I get variations of the same conversation.

    “What? You can’t smell coffee?”

    “No.”

    “What about burnt toast?”

    “No.”

    “What about aftershave?”

    “No.”

    At this point the conversation starts descending into that famous scene from BBC’s Red Dwarf.

    “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

    “What, Captain Hollister?”

    “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

    “What, Peterson?”

    “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

    No.

    I can’t smell coffee.

    I can’t smell toast.

    I can’t smell aftershave.

    I can’t smell anything.

    Funny as it is, it becomes a little tiring after the hundredth repetition.

    These days, when someone asks:

    “So you can’t smell roses?”

    I sometimes reply:

    “Can you see through walls?”

    Both questions are equally unhelpful to understanding.

    I then explain that I know smell exists and I know Superman can see through walls.

    I understand the theory.

    I simply don’t, and never will, understand the experience itself.

    I understand smell intellectually in much the same way I understand quantum mechanics.

    I accept that it exists.

    I can even comprehend some of the details of the process.

    Beyond that, things become rather fuzzy.

    Things People Forget Smell Does

    Once people understand that I can’t smell, I occasionally get this sort of response:

    “Ooh, lucky you. You’ll never have to experience a hot, sweaty Tube train.”

    I usually have rather less patience with this one.

    My response is generally something along the lines of:

    “And blind people never have to experience what passes for modern art these days.”

    Smell is an important sense.

    Not only is it heavily linked to flavour, but it also contributes significantly to memory and environmental awareness.

    Taste itself is largely handled by the tongue and remains unaffected. We can detect sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami flavours, as well as sensations like the cooling effect of menthol and the burning sensation of capsaicin.

    Smell, however, contributes enormously to the richness and complexity of flavour.

    It’s also closely connected to memory.

    The olfactory bulb has direct connections to parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus.

    There’s a reason certain smells can instantly transport people back to childhood and why senses are important in laying down new memories.

    My memories simply use different triggers.

    Smell also provides environmental awareness.

    It helps detect danger.

    It warns of fires, gas leaks, spoiled food and other hazards.

    I’ve had so many cases of food poisoning over my lifetime that I’ve genuinely lost count.

    So yes, there are disadvantages.

    Detecting spoiled food.

    Detecting smoke.

    Detecting gas leaks.

    These are all things I have to think about differently.

    That said, there are advantages too.

    I grew up on a dairy farm.

    Without going into too much detail, I’m sure you can imagine at least some of them.

    Summing Up

    Do I wish I could smell?

    Of course.

    Curiosity alone would make it worthwhile.

    I’d love to know what coffee smells like.

    Or petrichor after rain.

    Or my wife’s perfume.

    Or whether everybody has been telling the truth about bacon all these years.

    But congenital anosmia isn’t really a story about loss.

    You can’t lose something you never had.

    It’s simply a different way of experiencing the world.

    Besides, the only thing I know for certain that stinks is my sense of humour.

  • The Internet Was More Interesting Before Everything Became a Platform

    The Internet Was More Interesting Before Everything Became a Platform

    I remember the early days of the internet.

    I remember the terrible websites with flashing green text on red backgrounds, animated GIFs in abundance, JavaScript visitor counters at the bottom of the page, MIDI tunes that started playing when you accessed the site, and entire websites dedicated to someone’s hamster.

    (Guilty as charged, m’lud.)

    And you know what?

    It was GLORIOUS!

    Don’t worry, this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud infrastructure” post.

    The old internet wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t ideal, and it certainly wasn’t always safe.

    However, what it was, was quintessentially human.

    THE INTERNET USED TO FEEL GEOGRAPHICAL

    The actual internet was a highway.

    It wasn’t the destination, but the means of travelling between weird towns, villages, and hamlets, each of which specialised in… well… something.

    Much like the towns in the Mad Max universe, where you have Bartertown, Gastown, Bullet Farm, and Tomorrow-morrow Land, the internet had Hamsterville, Catopolis, Conspiracy Creek, and Anosmia Acres.

    I was a serial website owner.

    I ran an anosmia support forum which, somehow, got me on television for my fifteen minutes of fame.

    Its design may well have made visitors’ eyes bleed, granted, but as it was a support group for people with no sense of smell, it was perhaps appropriate that my design stank. (See featured image from The Internet archive above!)

    I ran a joke conspiracy PHPBB forum called the UK Conspiracy Nexus, where every “member” was another character I had created and all the posts, arguments, and discussions were written by me.

    I deliberately invented ridiculous conspiracy theories, such as the connection between Toblerone and Illuminati mind-control dentistry.

    It’s the triangular shape, you see.

    It was all good fun… until I noticed my posts being shared non-ironically on more “serious” conspiracy sites.

    Dear God.

    What did I spawn?

    I also created a maths and general nerdiness site dedicated to things geeks might find “sexy” (that is to say, cool).

    In hindsight, calling it Sex4Geeks was perhaps inviting exactly the sort of dubious attention it received.

    That site was short-lived.

    It did, however, end up becoming a joke in my best man’s wedding speech.

    Pete?

    Naive much?

    Heck yes.

    But the internet was full of things like this.

    BBSs.

    Usenet.

    Forums.

    IRC.

    Personal webpages written in hand-crafted HTML.

    It wasn’t one place.

    It was thousands of interconnected little places, each with their own personality, culture, and rules.

    You didn’t live there.

    You visited.

    You travelled between them.

    You discovered them.

    You got lost.

    Wonderfully so.

    NOBODY NEEDED A BUSINESS PLAN

    The majority of the internet back then existed for one reason.

    Someone cared about something enough to make something about it.

    Not because they wanted followers, subscribers, sponsorships, or monetisation.

    It was because somebody cared enough about model railways, their collection of Tamagotchis, or the history of the China tea trade.

    They had passion and they wanted to share it.

    There was a website for every niche interest and most of them looked as though they had been assembled during an environmental catastrophe and built entirely in the dark.

    THE GREAT CONSOLIDATION

    Of course, initially seen as a fad, the internet proved it wasn’t going anywhere.

    People realised its potential.

    You could now order a pizza online.

    Such a technological breakthrough is something we take entirely for granted nowadays.

    Companies with ideas and dollar signs in their eyes jumped in.

    Slowly, giants emerged from the chaos.

    Where once there had been millions of random amateur websites, suddenly you had Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

    Then YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok.

    These places acted like magnets, drawing in the weird from the satellite towns, villages, and hamlets, and housing them instead in vast digital metropolises.

    THE ALGORITHMS THAT ATE DISCOVERY

    Finding things used to be an adventure.

    There were a few basic search engines, reciprocal links, blogrolls, and web rings connecting like-minded sites together.

    You would wander around them feeling as though you were forging your own path through a strange and fascinating landscape.

    You discovered what people made.

    You sought out things that interested you.

    Now we no longer discover what people made.

    We discover what the algorithms, working on behalf of the platforms, want us to see.

    Want your site to appear first in search results?

    Just pay lots of money.

    It’s even worse now with AI-generated summaries appearing above the sites that originally created the content.

    In the pursuit of making things easier, we lost something human along the way.

    THE DEATH OF WEIRD

    The old internet was eccentric, amateur, and personal.

    Websites now look polished, optimised, branded, and laden with “smart” features.

    The old internet may have looked like a terrible hodgepodge mess, but it looked like somebody.

    It was human.

    Much of today’s internet looks like a corporation.

    A polished, focus-grouped, metrics-driven corporation.

    A CONFESSION

    Nostalgia is a terrible historian.

    As Baz Luhrmann famously said:

    “Nostalgia is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

    The old internet had its fair share of problems.

    Awful design.

    Scams.

    Misinformation.

    Toxicity.

    Every village conspiracy nut could find a like-minded community and build little echo chambers where the worst ideas fed off one another and grew.

    I’m not arguing that the old internet was perfect.

    I’m simply saying it was more human.

    We still have scams, misinformation, and toxicity.

    Now it’s just run by a handful of billionaire puppet masters.

    WE LOST MORE THAN WEBSITES

    The real loss wasn’t the technology.

    That grew.

    Who would have imagined we’d one day carry around access to the sum total of human knowledge on a small device that fits in the palm of our hand?

    We lost individuality.

    Experimentation.

    Curiosity.

    And yes, weirdness.

    The internet became a consumer space for selling content rather than a creative space for sharing ideas.

    IN CONCLUSION

    Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I reincarnated this blog.

    Not because I expect thousands of readers.

    Not because I have a monetisation strategy.

    Not because some marketing consultant told me to build my personal brand.

    No.

    Because I miss people having little corners of the internet that belonged to them.

    Places where we could be knowledgeable, enthusiastic, eccentric, or even completely wrong about something.

    Places that felt human.

    The internet may have become a platform, but there’s still room for the occasional strange little website.

    Or should I say, in my case, the occasional strange Little website.

    This is my own weird nest on the web.

  • The Difference Between Sound and Noise.

    The Difference Between Sound and Noise.

    I’m a bit of a contradiction when it comes to my autistic sensibilities.

    I cannot tolerate noise.

    Office chatter, traffic noise, dripping taps, ticking clocks, snoring, eating sounds (misophonia), or other people’s phone calls and conversations in general.

    This would lead you to think I am sensory avoidant and, to some extent, I am.

    However, My autistic noise sensitivity has an exception, I adore music.

    Music is one of my great pleasures in life.

    My noise-cancelling headphones are rarely off my head. I wear them as soon as I leave the house or office and listen to music constantly.

    My musical tastes can best be described as:

    “Yes.”

    On any given day I might listen to progressive rock, punk, heavy metal, opera, film soundtracks, musical theatre, dad rock, classical music, or, on particularly unusual afternoons, Mongolian throat singing.

    Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has long since given up trying to profile me and now simply appears to be selecting tracks using a random number generator and mild panic.

    In the world of sound there is a profound difference between music and noise.

    Music is controlled, predictable, and chosen.

    Noise is intrusive, random, unwarranted and, in most cases, unavoidable.

    I live in London.

    It’s hardly a haven of peace, calm and quiet serenity and not a place for someone with autistic noise sensitivity!

    Well, bits of it can be. More on that later.

    But the city isn’t designed to be noisy. It’s not even designed to be quiet. Noise is simply an unavoidable side effect of being a large, bustling metropolis.

    London is a loud place.

    Then again, it’s not always about volume.

    It’s about the inescapable wall of sound and its chaotic, unpredictable nature.

    Noise Fatigue

    Being constantly immersed in a sea of sound is draining.

    Much like Chinese water torture, it slowly chips away at my calm and increases my cognitive overload. External noise increases my internal static and makes my stammer worse.

    This results in difficulty concentrating, feeling worn out, exhaustion and an increased likelihood of meltdown.

    Death by a thousand auditory paper cuts.

    The Survival Equipment

    In order to get through the day with minimal fuss, I have an everyday carry survival kit.

    • My noise-cancelling headphones (a battered pair of Sony WH-1000XM3s held together with duct tape)
    • Loop Quiet earplugs
    • A spare set of fallback Bluetooth earbuds (some cheap brand, as I keep losing them)

    My morning routine as I leave the house is:

    Headphones.

    Keys.

    Wallet.

    Usually in that order.

    I’d rather discover I’d forgotten my wallet or my keys than my headphones, which probably says something quite worrying about me.

    More worrying, perhaps, is that I’ve frequently forgotten the latter, but as long as I have my headphones I’m fine.

    I may not be able to get back into the house.

    I may not be able to buy lunch.

    But hey, at least I’m not exposed to noise.

    Havens of Calm in the Chaos

    As mentioned above, not all of London is a hellish soundscape.

    For all its flaws, London has an astounding number of parks, museums, churches and galleries.

    When I’m in the middle of London I can often find much-needed respite by nipping into one of the many parks and listening to birdsong, or by popping into a museum or gallery to calm my inner turmoil.

    And although I’m not a religious person, I do love the peaceful calm of a church or cathedral.

    I can understand why those of a more spiritual nature feel something in such places.

    The peace is almost palpable.

    Like a comforting presence.

    Closing Thoughts

    So yes, I love sound.

    At least, I love music and the sounds of nature.

    I love birdsong, babbling brooks, complex harmonies, soaring orchestras, distorted guitars, operatic voices and whatever noise Mongolian throat singers have somehow persuaded their anatomy to produce.

    What I don’t love is my brain trying to process every single noise in the environment simultaneously.

    The difference between music and noise isn’t volume.

    It’s consent.

    One I invited in.

    The other kicked the door down and started defecating on the furniture.

  • Small Talk Is TCP Handshaking for Humans

    Small Talk Is TCP Handshaking for Humans

    I have long suspected that small talk is not really about talking at all. I mean, obviously it’s about talking, but it’s not about imparting information or saying anything of actual interest.

    It is, I think, more accurately described as a kind of human protocol negotiation. A lightweight exchange whose purpose is not to transfer meaningful information, but to confirm that both parties are present, functional, and broadly willing to proceed without causing a scene.

    In computer networking terms, it feels rather a lot like a TCP three-way handshake.

    That may sound like an over-complicated way to describe “Morning” and “Busy day?” but I maintain it is exactly the right amount of over-complication.

    The analogy works on several levels at once.

    TCP handshakeHuman small talk
    SYN“Morning.”
    SYN/ACK“Morning. Busy today?”
    ACK“Yeah, not too bad.”
    Connection establishedActual conversation may now proceed

    The actual content is almost irrelevant.

    The handshake exists to establish availability, willingness, compatibility, safety, and communication parameters. Small talk does much the same thing. It is not there to win prizes for insight. It is there to say, in the safest possible way:

    I see you. You seem non-threatening. We may now continue.

    That is quite a useful invention, really.

    It is also, for some of us, faintly bewildering.

    Because my brain has a tendency to assume conversations should do one of three things:

    1. exchange useful information.
    2. explore an interesting idea.
    3. contain at least one genuinely terrible joke.

    Small talk often does none of these things.

    Which is not to say it is pointless. Far from it. It is just that its point is not always the same as the point my brain is looking for.

    That can make it feel a bit like packet loss.

    Some of the signal gets through. Some of it doesn’t. A few words arrive intact, but the important meaning seems to have been dropped somewhere between the intention and the execution.

    The weather is discussed.

    The weekend is mentioned.

    A vague inquiry is made about one’s wellbeing.

    And yet the actual data being transmitted is something like:

    I am safe. You are safe. We may continue this interaction without immediate risk of social collapse.

    That is a rather elegant system when it works properly.

    It is also a system with some spectacular failure modes.

    Failed Handshake

    Sometimes the handshake fails immediately.

    You offer the smallest possible opening.

    “Morning.”

    And the other person replies:

    “Is it? I mean the way the world’s going it might as well be the end of days. The planet’s going to hell in a hand basket and we’re all doomed.”

    At that point the connection has not merely failed. It has been forcibly terminated, the cable has been unplugged, and the router has probably started smoking.

    Connection reset by peer.

    Timeout

    Then there is the timeout problem.

    Someone asks:

    “How are you?”

    and the answer requires a socially acceptable level of detail, emotional calibration, and acceptable honesty.

    My brain, meanwhile, is attempting to calculate whether “fine” is technically accurate, whether “surviving” sounds too bleak, whether “not bad” is too British to be believable (see below!), and whether any response longer than six words will prompt a follow-up I do not have the energy to sustain.

    By the time I have finished this internal analysis, the moment has passed.

    Connection timed out.

    Packet Flooding

    Some people go in the opposite direction.

    You offer:

    “Morning.”

    And they respond:

    “Morning! Did you see that interesting show on TV last night about medieval bridge taxation? Made me think about my current view on plug in solar panels, my advancing years, my neighbour’s cat, and the collapse of the world’s democratic politics systems..”

    That is not a handshake.

    That is packet flooding.

    ADHD can do this rather beautifully. One tiny conversational spark and suddenly a completely unrelated archive of information is bursting out of the firewall at speed.

    Which, to be fair, can sometimes be entertaining.

    It just isn’t small talk anymore. There’s nothing small about it.

    Encrypted Traffic

    Us British people add another layer of complexity, because many of us speak in what is essentially encrypted traffic.

    “Not bad.”

    Not only is this British understatement at its very best, this can mean:

    • life is actually pretty good actually!
    • life is acceptable.
    • life is mildly annoying and could be better.
    • life is a bit of a struggle but let us not make a fuss.
    • a bottomless abyss has opened beneath me, but the kettle still works, so we are continuing cup in hand and trying our best to avoid the hordes of demons spewing forth from this hellish portal.

    That is an extraordinary amount of information to pack into two words.

    It is also one of the reasons small talk can be so difficult to decode. The literal words are only half the message. Tone, timing, context, and cultural expectation carry the rest.

    The protocol is not just words.

    It is inference, and unfortunately, not something I’m particularly good at.

    UDP People

    Then there are people who skip the handshake entirely.

    They are the conversational equivalent of UDP.

    “HELLO STRANGER HERE IS MY INFODUMP OF TRAUMAS, PROBLEMS AND CONCERNS!!.”

    No connection setup.

    No reliability guarantees.

    No orderly exchange of packets.

    Just pure, immediate data transfer with absolutely no regard for conventional protocol.

    This can be alarming, but occasionally refreshing.

    Stateful Firewall

    Autistic masking probably deserves its own category here.

    It can feel a bit like trying to pass through a stateful firewall while manually monitoring every tiny aspect of your own behaviour.

    Eye contact? Adjusted.

    Tone? Checked.

    Facial expression? Calibrated.

    Volume? Sensible.

    Response time? Natural enough to avoid suspicion.

    Internal panic? Well hidden, hopefully.

    The result is not always elegant, but it is functional.. barely.

    NAT Traversal

    Trying to socialise at parties is also very much like NAT traversal.

    You know there is a connection somewhere in there.

    You know the other person is a perfectly ordinary human being.

    You know you are supposed to be able to reach them.

    And yet the routing is somehow wrong, the ports are blocked, and everyone is standing in awkward little clusters pretending not to notice that all communication has become mysteriously more difficult than it should be.

    And when you do get into a cluster, the least said about the actual handshaking the better. (Especially Dave with the sweaty palms!)

    So Why Does Small Talk Exist At All?

    Because it is doing a job.

    A very human job.

    Small talk reduces uncertainty.

    It establishes connection.

    It signals intent.

    It gives both parties a safe place to stand before deciding whether to move into more meaningful territory.

    It is a social compatibility check.

    A “yes, we can talk” exchange.

    A way of saying:

    I am friendly.

    You are safe.

    We may proceed.

    That is actually rather beautiful, when you think about it.

    Even if the words themselves are often about absolutely nothing of consequence.

    Why It Feels So Hard

    For many neurodivergent people, the difficulty is not that small talk is meaningless.

    The difficulty is that its meaning is often indirect.

    It is a social ritual disguised as conversation.

    A lot of the work is happening in the subtext.

    And subtext is a slippery little creature.

    If your brain prefers clarity, precision, and explicit information, small talk can feel like being asked to decode a message written in invisible ink.

    Which, admittedly, is not very helpful.

    The Human Side of the Protocol

    And yet…

    And yet, for all my cantankerous grumbling, I do think there is something lovely about it.

    We are, after all, social animals operating a remarkably fragile but surprisingly effective communication system. Small talk is one of the tiny pieces of software that keeps the whole thing from crashing immediately.

    It is how we ease into each other’s company.

    It is how we test for warmth.

    It is how we say, with minimal risk and maximum politeness, that we are willing to share a moment. You’re lowering your shields and allowing the Klingons to beam aboard.

    That is not nothing.

    In Closing

    So yes, perhaps small talk is the human equivalent of a TCP handshake.

    A few neat little exchanges whose real purpose is not the content, but the connection.

    Sometimes it works perfectly.

    Sometimes it fails immediately.

    Sometimes the packets arrive out of order.

    Sometimes somebody starts talking about medieval bridge taxation or python programming before the connection is even established.

    But when it does work, it lets two strangers become, very briefly, not strangers at all.

    And really, that is quite a clever trick for a few essentially meaningless words and a friendly look over a cup of coffee.

  • Growing Old without Growing Up.

    Growing Old without Growing Up.

    Growing older is inevitable. We can’t escape time’s relentless arrow.

    Becoming dull, joyless and terminally serious, however, is entirely optional.

    Somewhere along the journey into adulthood society quietly slips us a secret rulebook explaining which activities are considered acceptable and which are not. Which hobbies are “appropriate” and which enthusiasms should probably be packed away in the loft next to your old Action Men and abandoned dreams.

    Apparently the rules are something like this:

    • Assembling obscure collections = eccentric
    • Getting excited about games or toys = immature
    • Watching cartoons as an adult = deeply concerning
    • Discussing Discworld or Hitchhiker’s Guide lore at length = suspicious

    I appear to have misplaced my copy of the rulebook.

    But really… what is an adult?

    As children we assume adults understand life. We imagine they possess confidence, competence and secret knowledge unavailable to younger minds. Adults seem unfazed by everything. They understand taxes voluntarily. They know how insurance works. They probably even enjoy shopping for furniture in IKEA.

    You assume that one day a hidden switch in your brain will flip from Child Mode to Fully Operational Adult™ and suddenly the mysteries of existence will reveal themselves.

    Except that day never comes.

    Instead there’s just a gradual realisation that you’re no longer young. One day you’re racing down hills on a bicycle pretending to be a fighter pilot and the next you’re comparing broadband tariffs and wondering why your knee sounds like a creaky floorboard.

    Internally though?

    You still feel remarkably similar.

    You still have the same interests, fears, fascinations, anxieties and bizarre little enthusiasms. There’s a strange disconnect between your physical age and your internal self-image. In your head you’re still basically you, just with slightly more back pain and stronger opinions about kitchen appliances.

    Perhaps more worryingly, you eventually realise you’re now expected to be the responsible adult.

    You may even have children of your own who look up at you with the same wide-eyed certainty you once directed at your parents. They assume you know what you’re doing.

    Meanwhile internally you’re thinking:

    “I’m improvising wildly and hoping nobody notices here Kid!.”

    I still occasionally feel like three children in a trench coat trying very hard to pretend they understand mortgages.

    Although we don’t change much internally, society expects us to change externally. We’re expected to become relentlessly sensible. Calm. Productive. Emotionally stable. Proper grown-ups.

    Enthusiasm becomes embarrassing.

    Silliness becomes socially risky.

    Wonder becomes suspicious.

    Stoic calm and maturity becomes the norm.

    Personally, I think locking away curiosity, humour and joy in the name of adulthood does nobody any favours.

    Let’s talk about collections for a moment.

    You’re at a dinner party and someone asks what you do for fun.

    You explain that you collect slide rules, Rubik’s Cubes, fossils, cravats and old books.

    At this point you can actually watch them mentally powering down.

    You see the unspoken question slowly forming behind their eyes:

    “…why?”

    What they often don’t see is the curiosity behind it. The tactile pleasure. The fascination. The sense of continuity. The joy of holding strange little fragments of human creativity and history in your hands.

    To them it’s clutter.

    To you it’s wonder.

    Some people collect watches, paintings, cars or increasingly expensive kitchen gadgets. Depending on your social circle they may even collect spouses.

    But somewhere along the line adulthood collectively decided that joy should justify itself economically.

    I respectfully disagree.

    In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mike Teevee complains that everything in the titular factory is pointless.

    Charlie replies:

    “Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”

    Exactly.

    Joy should exist for joy’s sake.

    Not everything meaningful has to be monetised, optimised or transformed into a side hustle for LinkedIn.

    As children our worries were relatively small. Did we have enough pocket money for sweets? Did we finish our homework? Would our Tamagotchi survive the weekend?

    Adulthood brings heavier concerns.

    Work. Money. Relationships. Responsibilities. Health. Anxiety. Stress.

    Your body also starts developing what can only be described as “design quirks”.

    Your eyesight deteriorates. Your waistline expands despite eating approximately the same foods you survived on perfectly well at twenty. Your hair either turns grey, disappears entirely or relocates mysteriously to your ears.

    And through all of this you’re still expected to project the calm, controlled demeanour of Proper Adulthood.

    But humour and joy are forms of resilience.

    They’re coping mechanisms that provide perspective on what actually matters.

    That isn’t avoidance.

    Sometimes humour is how humans carry heavy things without collapsing under the weight.

    There is, however, an important distinction between being childish and being childlike.

    Childishness is selfishness, irresponsibility and emotional immaturity.

    Childlikeness is curiosity, imagination, enthusiasm, creativity, playfulness and wonder.

    Unfortunately society confuses the two constantly.

    Push back against this whenever possible.

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with remaining curious about the world.

    At fifty-six years of age I’ve realised a few things:

    • Impressing everyone is impossible.
    • Fitting in is seriously overrated.
    • Most social rules were invented by people no wiser than you.
    • Life is finite and you only get one go at it.

    Once you realise this, something rather liberating happens.

    You give yourself permission to enjoy things openly.

    To dress oddly if it makes you happy.

    To collect weird objects, even if they are Spores, Moulds and Fungus. (Thanks Egon.)

    To laugh more.

    To stop pretending.

    To become more authentically yourself.

    So yes, I’m getting older.

    My knees occasionally produce noises worthy of a haunted mansion and I now make involuntary sound effects whenever standing up from a chair.

    But I still love puzzles.

    I still laugh at terrible jokes.

    I still make even worse puns.

    I still derive immense joy from simple things.

    I can still freewheel down a hill on a bicycle grinning like an idiot.

    And I may occasionally become unreasonably excited upon discovering an old bookshop or toyshop.

    Does that mean I never fully grew up?

    I can probably live with that.

    Quite happily, in fact.