I totally get where you’re coming from. I am often kept awake at night thinking of times from even decades ago when I thought a conversation was going well and out of nowhere someone snapped and suddenly was mad at me and I have no idea why it happened. I don’t have any idea what went wrong, all I know is that it did, and over many years of this I simply opt out of talking to people. It’ll go wrong at some point so why bother?

I did want to provide some (hopefully) helpful context for the conversations that seem to trail off after initial interest. I personally am very easily overwhelmed by talking to people, even if I actively want to. I will often not have much to say in response when I am out of energy, which leads people to think I am upset at them or not interested in talking to them, and I know it contributes to other people’s anxieties. I have never found a socially acceptable way to tell people “I’m not up for this right now” that doesn’t make them get MORE upset than just not responding. I have no idea if that is what is happening to you, but I hope a little bit of perspective from the other side might help you.

I hope this doesn’t come off as some kind of invalidation, because I definitely understand the feeling of wondering why someone suddenly seems to not want to talk to you, I just wanted to reassure you that it might not be anything you did and could just be all on the other side.

I firmly believe that after a certain amount of money there is no longer “joy” in having money and they all have to find something else to get their fix so to speak.

It just so happens that hurting people (or more accurately, having the power to make people hurt themselves and put themselves through humiliation to please you) is the only thing that they enjoy after they’ve won the money part of life.

Even small businesses do this, owner gets the car they’ve always wanted and then just decides to make everyone that works for them as miserable as possible, even if it costs them more money to do that, because the high from that is WAY better than the money they could otherwise make.

Never had my hearing tested but I can say anecdotally that many times I have been at work listening to music from my computer and had people walk up to me to talk to, which leads to me saying “let me pause my music” and them to respond “what music?” I often have the volume on everything that has controllable volume as low as I can possibly set it.

I very often hear things no one else does, to the point people think I’m insane because I’m absolutely hearing it but no one else can so they don’t believe me.

Any noise that I don’t know is an immediate problem for me. If I don’t know what it is and I can hear it, I absolutely have to stop what I’m doing and find out. I can’t convince myself to stop this because it’s actually led me to detecting leaky pipes in my house twice now, right as they broke.

Also the sound of cotton balls rubbing together. Horrendous. And coil whine of electronics, that’s awful too. As is just the sound of electricity in general, like fluorescent lights make an awful noise. I’m gonna stop here before this becomes a novel.

I think it’s just an unfortunate part of human nature to enjoy looking down on others. Don’t get me a wrong, a lot of people can get over that, but some people don’t. It’s an easy shortcut to feeling better about oneself that a lot of people fall in to.

When I was younger, I pointed out a friend of mine had trouble making eye contact. It was a shitty thing of me to do because I’ve spent my entire life getting shit on because I avoid eye contact like the plague. I felt immediately bad about doing it and apologized later. I had to really inspect why it was I felt like that was an acceptable thing to do, because it certainly was not.

I find it helpful to point out to people that they inherently understand that it feels bad to have people make fun of you or belittle you, and they need to put themselves in the other persons shoes. Sometimes it’s just that, someone did not even think to make the connection that being treated that way doesn’t feel good, so you shouldn’t do that to other people.