> a side effect of experiencing the world differently

A side effect for which there is a substantial, lifelong, and most importantly wide cost, even if it occasionally confers usually small, usually fleeting, and most importantly narrow advantage.

At such cost with such narrow advantage, why has it persisted so pervasively? I would counter that the advantage is wider and the cost narrower than your current value system is allowing you to accept.

Natural selection doesn't care about cost or advantage, only reproduction.

It is the sum of costs and advantages that lead to reproductive success. The trait is still here and still prevalent meaning people are still getting laid and starting families and presumably leading fulfilling lives.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

> I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

I'm saying, if it doesn't ruin lives to the point of preventing reproduction, then it stays in the gene pool.

Basically, I'm saying this:

> The trait is still here and still prevalent meaning people are still getting laid and starting families and presumably leading fulfilling lives.

As long as an organism isn't performing too badly, it stays in the gene pool. It can persist and even share its genes more broadly, if in diluted form, to the other more successful organisms. And then some of those mixed-genes organisms may occasionally express more strongly, but again not enough to affect reproductive success across the population.

Yes, there is a significant cost to being built differently regardless of perceived advantages (by one's self or others). For example, as an autistic, I have to cope with finding interaction with non-autistics quite difficult for me, even if detail-oriented thinking can make certain tasks seem easier to me.