I've been struggling with how I perceive other people.
Most of the time I don't really feel other people as individuals in an emotional way. It's more like I see them as patterns or roles rather than distinct inner lives. I can understand what people do on an intellectual level, but I don't naturally connect to what they feel or why it matters to them.
Because of that, I often feel like I'm observing human behavior from the outside, almost like I don't fully belong in the same “world model” as everyone else. Social values that seem very important to others (relationships, family, group identity, moral outrage, etc.) often feel distant or confusing to me. The only shared value that consistently makes sense to me is practical survival stuff like money, because it's necessary for living and functioning.
This disconnect has also affected how I interpret stories and characters. In fiction, I sometimes find myself empathizing more with “non-human” or antagonistic characters, or with characters others clearly see as evil or wrong, because their motivations feel simpler or more coherent to me than human social dynamics.
I also notice that I don't experience certain emotional reactions that other people seem to have very strongly, like shame, disgust in social contexts, or moral outrage. Instead, I mostly just observe reactions in others without automatically sharing them.
At the same time, I do experience a strong sense of alienation and sometimes irritation or disgust toward people in general, especially in group contexts where everyone seems to be operating on assumptions I don't share. This tends to create conflict, because I often end up saying things that others interpret as provocative or inappropriate, especially when I'm trying to quickly test how people will react to extreme ideas or boundaries.
The end result is that I often feel socially incompatible with most environments I'm in. It's not just disagreement, it feels like a mismatch in how reality is being interpreted.