Are Psychopaths' Lives Easier?

Or do they just come with a unique set of problems...

All right, you all made it. It is the other side of the topic that occupied my posts the last couple of weeks. Finally, back to normalcy. Well… for you guys anyway. I will still have more weirdness on my end to wade through in order to provide you all with stuff to read.

It is not difficult to assume that psychopathic wiring would make for an easier life than that of a neurotypical. However, that isn’t necessarily the case. It also depends on your version of easy. Neurotypicals have an innate language built in that most understand from jumpstreet and they use it as their primary means of communication. Psychopaths on the other hand are entirely frozen out of this little club, so we have to figure it out manually.

Oh wait, there’s more to that. You see, while we are different, our parents aren’t. They’re neurotypical, and aren’t going to understand how we function. So, we have to figure out that, not only do we not fit the status quo, we also have no one to ask about it. We have to figure ourselves out, and figure neurotypicals out, and being a toddler out, all at the same time. Fun right?

We aren’t allowed to not care about our siblings’ problems. That’s not empathetic.

We aren’t allowed to stay home from grandma’s funeral. What kind of monster are you anyway?

We do not understand why saying something to someone (yes that dress is really ugly) is hurtful. I didn’t call her ugly, did I? No. But I’m still in trouble.

We do not understand why everyone else is so damn weird, and we really don’t understand why they seem to cry all the time.

“Mommy, why do people cry?”

“Why do you think they cry?” Typical parent answer looking to get them to answer their own question. I distinctly think that this was the decided strategy that parents agreed to among themselves to counter the ‘why’ game by the way.

“Because they want stuff….” comes the logical answer. That’s why I cry after all.

“They cry because they are sad or hurt…… and what?”

“Nothing” sliding back out the door and to the safety of the television with more confusing lessons that make no sense. Hey, at least I don’t get the leery eye from the TV.

Do we have it easier when we are older? Probably, but really that’s like asking if someone who went through on-the-job training to become a plumber and finally got that six-figure salary. Sure, they have a nice life now, but it wasn’t handed to them. They crawled through a metric ton of sh*t to get that income. It didn’t come to them easily, they worked for it.

You might think that us not thinking like you is a benefit, and it is, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not through hard work that we are successful in life. We had to study harder than anyone. We still really have no idea what is wrong with you people ninety-nine percent of the time, but we aren’t raving lunatics in the street screaming;

“WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!! SERIOUSLY???”

If we didn’t put the work in, we would ask you, on a constant basis to explain yourselves. We are vexed by many of your interactions. We see wasted time and energy everywhere, and this need to be liked everywhere. I get the tribalism reasoning, but it’s still weird, okay? It’s just weird. I also understand that there is a requirement for most humans to have a connection, and that connection drives the habits that confuse us so, such as wanting to be liked. It doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t something that we can relate to.

We are where we are because we put the hard work in. We will never feel like you do, and we see our way through the emotional landscape like we have the master code. We learned this, we weren’t gifted with it from birth. We can’t exist in your version of the world, so we mastered getting around in it, but getting around it in general.

When I was a child I was in a near constant state of being questioned it seemed. No matter how many times I adjusted to meet the expectations of those around me, I still had more to do. Everyone’s feelings had to be considered, but I didn’t understand those feelings. I had to take for granted that those emotional experiences were actually what was happening, when I saw those same people who were so upset by something that I apparently did using those exact same emotions disingenuously to get what they wanted out of someone else.

In my mind, it seemed like so long as you had the ability to have those emotions, and so long as they were real in some circumstances, it was fine to use them however that person wanted to use them, but if you weren’t able to feel those emotions, but pretended to do so just as those around you do, somehow you’re in the wrong. How… does that make sense? It doesn’t.

You know what really struck me as odd? When people do something wrong, what makes them eligible for forgiveness or a “pass” for their wrongdoing is how bad they felt about whatever they did. That seemed so silly to me. They didn’t feel bad about it before they did it, but now that they’re caught and feel bad about it, that makes it somehow okay. However, if I do something, knowing just as the neurotypical knew, that what I was doing was wrong, because I don’t feel bad about it, that makes it worse.

How?

How does that make things worse? The neurotypical knew it was wrong, and they still did it. Them crying about it shouldn’t change anything. First of all, I don’t really think that they feel bad about anything. It looks like a manipulative display to me. Second of all, even if they do feel bad about it, so what? They obviously didn’t feel that way enough to prevent them from doing it in the first place.

That cheating for instance and the guilt that is supposedly there when the affair is discovered. That guilt, to me, is such a lie. People confess affairs for instance. I don’t believe in cheating, it’s against my code of conduct, but if you do it, and you just have to confess your crime, you are not doing it for your partner. Make no mistake, that is all about you. That’s to make you feel better. They would have been better off if you found your own off switch and stopped yourself from talking. Then again, they would have been better off if you had the self-control to not cheat in the first place, but if you’re going to be a self-absorbed partner, in for a penny, in for a pound. Right?

That’s just one version of guilt that I think is BS, and from what I have seen, often guilt is about making you, the person who committed the act, feel better, not in any way about repairing the act itself. Sure, you might have learned something. Good for you, want a cookie? In other words, guilt seems to me to be primarily selfishly motivated.

My point is that in my mind the “guilt” that the cheater supposedly felt doesn’t seem real to me. Even if it were, why should it be given any mind? Because the performance looked good? I can make a performance look good, but anyone who knows who and what I am knows that is exactly what it is, a performance. Why should my lack of guilt be considered a negative when the neurotypical “guilt” is about self-preservation and self-soothing, but that somehow makes their actions forgivable?

The number of contradictions and hypocrisies in the world when it comes to the emotional rules are many and they are annoying. For so much value to be placed on emotions by neurotypicals, they seem to be used as tools for self-gain as often as it is a real experience. When things look to be so transactional, learning that our general attraction to transactional engagement is considered a “bad thing” is pretty confusing. It seems to be rather contradictory.

Psychopaths are in a continuous state of learning what is normal and expected in the neurotypical world. People seem to think that we are born with some natural ability to move seamlessly through the world, to be able to read people, to interact with people in a way that gets us what we want, and how to charmingly sidestep trouble when it looks in our direction, but that is a load of garbage. We had to learn all of that, and learn it in a way that not only benefits us actively, as in getting what we want, but also passively, as in not getting us into what we do not want.

Frankly, I don’t want to be involved in emotional drama. No psychopath does. The idea that we thrive on causing drama and emotionally riling people up is just not the case. To us, it is a total waste of time. We don’t understand why you’re upset, and we don’t want to have to spend the time to figure it out. There isn’t a payoff for us to see you upset. You being upset eats into our time to do what we want to do for us.

I will let you in on a little secret about drama. The more you are disinterested in drama, the more people try to suck you into it. It is the disinterest that makes them try harder. When you aren’t intrigued by the little hints that people drop trying to interest you in whatever emotional nonsense is happening in their lives, they will work harder to get the desired result. Not everyone, of course, but a fair number of people. Drama really feeds people, and we often have to pretend like we care.

Living life in a neurotypical world is living in a world that isn’t built for us… like at all. All the things that neurotypicals complain about and call “psychopathic” aren’t. Those things are common because it is human nature to engage in them. People want them to be unusual and they want them to be someone else’s fault, so they blame us. We learn to move about in this world, utilize the lessons of those around us for our benefit, and often will never know what it is that makes us different from those around us because the information surrounding the notion of psychopathy is full of emotional connotations making it something to be feared and hated.

We have to learn how to interact with neurotypicals and have to constantly shift to accommodate the emotions that are understood to be present but never truly understood. I think that people have this idea that they would like to be psychopathic because in their minds they would be making the choice to do so, but they would still retain their past experience with emotions. This would both make the absence of the emotions that caused them pain something of note, but also that they would have the memory of what those emotions were, and would have that innate understanding of how to behave with others that still feel them.

That isn’t being psychopathic, that wouldn’t be the experience of psychopathy. Part of the experience of being like me is that learning curve. If you can’t understand that learning curve and the consequences of ignoring it, you would never truly know what psychopaths’ lives are like. You would be a neurotypical who found an off-switch, not a psychopath who never had the on-switch to experience that comparison.

Life for a psychopath is different. It isn’t better, or easier, it’s just different. It isn’t something that can just be put on like a shroud and compared to a neurotypical life. It comes with its own pros and cons that are unique to it. Easier is simply a matter of perspective, and I think that it isn’t the way to consider things. The idea of what psychopathy is might be desirable to some neurotypicals, but if they actually experienced life as we do from the beginning, I think that they would reconsider thinking that it is somehow an unending paradise.

I will always prefer to be me as it is all that I know, but I think understanding that it has it's own issues is an important thing to consider.