In myself, overthinking is a quality I value very highly in some situations while also being one of the highest contributors to personal misery in other situations. In the net though, definitely a keeper.
As you say, it leads you down a path. Often at the beginning there is pain, such as being painfully self-conscious. At the end of the path is often self-development though.
>>> I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.
Exactly - I have never fought more battles to dominate than with my relatives. And to be fair the cases where I was getting along was when I fully subjugated to their will.
Realizing this, getting called "socially retarded" wasn't just an insult but somewhat descriptive. My mind was much more focused on other things and I could see and appreciate the result of those social efforts but at the time it seemed too much work and not very fun to bother with.
So I doubt the cause is a lack of ability or capabilities that leads to magical social awareness but actual compounding effort over years and decades. If you talk to a NT person about a situation they say "it's obvious" but if they break it down you see there actually is a richer decision tree underneath where they are empathizing with the other person's perspective and triangulating on their overall objectives and both physical and verbal cues they are providing to guide you one way or the other.
Realizing this means it is a difficult but solveable problem, which I found a great improvement over "I can't" or "they are the weird ones".
Obviously your brand of ND may be different from mind but everyone comes in with different skills as well as interests and focuses. It is best to remember were are ALL neuro-different, it is just a matter of degree and flavor. And also that no of this is innately easy for anyone - humans are social creatures and it makes sense our brains are equipped foe and spend a lot of energy on solving these problems.
I've been spending effort on this my whole life, and being in the position where it's still quite difficult for me but I manage to get by is the result of that effort, not because of a lack of it. If this was something I hadn't worked on with significant effort all these years, I wouldn't even be able to have the conversation that we're having right now without getting too frustrated or anxious to the point that I would just give up rather than try to engage at all in conversations online with strangers.
It's interesting to me that what I've described fits with feeling you've experienced, because I'm honestly having trouble feeling like much of what you describe having felt resembles what I've felt over the years. I don't think I ever assumed that other people didn't spend effort trying to understand how other people felt, and I spent _significant_ time and energy trying to understand what I could do to better relate to others; I just never was particularly successful at it.
It's worth mentioning is that I don't have any trouble empathizing with people generally; when people are sad or angry, or when I notice that they're experiencing something that I think is unfair, I feel those feelings quite strongly myself. My issue isn't that I can't relate to the feelings other people have, but that with the exception of people I'm close to and have spent a lot of time with, I have a lot of trouble figuring out exactly how other people feel if they don't express it to me. I've talked with plenty of neurotypical people about how they approach situations in the exact way you describe, but I haven't ever been able to do anything remotely similar to what they describe.
You mentioned that "it's just a matter of degree and flavor", but it seems like you assume that implies that the distribution of differences people have is relatively uniform. From my perspective, the issues you described having and the ways you learned to deal with them are so different from my experience that it's honestly feels like you're using them to handwave away the idea that anyone else might struggle with things far more than you did. I don't think that's your intention, but it really does come across like you fundamentally don't think that anyone struggles with these things much more or less than you have, and as someone who's tried my whole life to try to learn to communicate better with others, it seems pretty dismissive.
First, NTs don't ever consider anybody except themselves, they only care about their own good. Even when they seem like they're helping you, they only think they get some benefit from being seen doing so.
Second, they don't think like you do: What you consider a failure is a success to them. They memorize the phrase, and learn how they're supposed to react to it. You think they understand the phrase and come up with their own reply like you do, but they don't, because they can't.
There is nothing that can be understood about the NT world, it's all just rote learned. It's a cargo cult remnant of what people created when they were still normal, mixed with some random nonsense creativity of the schizophrenics who work on "improving" it. The only reason why you think you're failing at it is that the difference in intelligence between you and them is so vast.
The issue with communication is not that it is something that is unique to humans, but it is how all the animals are functioning. Other animals are more specialized and their brains are attuned to that specialized behaviour. Autistic peacock that would not understand the requirement for flashy tail would essentially have change in brains that would make it a different peacock species. There are even more trivial differences - fishes that specialize in eating different foods would evolve into different species that would not crossbreed(mostly because they would also evolve different mating rituals). However with humans it is different - while we do not differ on genetical level to be classified as different species, the difference in cultural norms and ceremonial behaviour would make us different species but we can shift and adapt to different cultural environments, so this is something that does not effect us so much, though it still occupies a very large space in our brains.
Anyway, if we are returning to the topic of job interviews, then it has nothing to do with answering the questions correctly - the issue is mainly how would you get along(at least that is what I can extrapolate from successful interviews being in both sides of table). That also applies to other communication fields - generally my understanding with communication failures with other people has come to conclusion that we would not be getting along anyway and the tolerance level from me is not so high and subconciously or even consciously I was the one that was showing disrespect to other person. And that applies to communication between autistic people even more. There is no need to learn answers to these questions at all - if you want to get that route, you are going to set yourself for a failure, because learning questions and how to behave changes rapidly not only among differnt cultures(in a global village that is impossible task), but also among generations... and in the end you need to grow your own backbone, because adapting to virtue signaling(which basically is what society consists) is not how it is done, as you can't run across savanna in a zebra flock avoiding lions all your life. At the end you want for other people to adapt to you or at least acknowledge from hyenas that you are an elephant that wants to eat grass and enjoy the company of other elephants. And at the end we are humans and humans even more than other species want to adapt environment around us - if you are trying to adapt only, including to other humans, this is going to be constant failure. Then again, this might not apply to everyone - my struggles are trying to dominate over other people obviously and I have not even decided if that is really something I require.
Yes, and that's exactly what's confusing to people like me who have autism; the question being asked isn't actually the question that they're looking for the answer to, and it's up to us to figure out what they actually mean. In this context, it might seem obvious to someone neurotypical, but I don't think I can easily articulate just how common this type of thing happens on a regular basis. The problem for me is that while I might understand what to do in this circumstance due to having encountered it before, it feels impossible to extrapolate what people mean when I'm in a new situation that I haven't had a chance to learn the "rules" for yet. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've had to separately learn what the expected norms are for pretty much every circumstance I've ever encountered when people say one thing but assume that it's clear that they mean something different.
The fact that most of this stuff is cultural doesn't really change the fact that implicitly learning rules like this is something that most people don't struggle with to the extent that people with autism do. To me, the issue isn't that I specifically want people to be "blunt and frank" or not, but that no one directly communicates what the expectations are, and that it's not as simple as a binary of whether to be blunt or not. Most people might struggle if they suddenly found themselves in a culture where the expectations were different than they were used to, but they probably didn't struggle to learn the expectations of their own culture. For me, learning the expectations of the culture I've spent my entire life in is still an ongoing process after over three decades, and I don't expect that it will ever really be complete.
An culture of all autistic people wouldn't be identifiable merely by how blunt they are, but by the giant binder they give everyone who comes to visit with all of the expectations written out to avoid any confusion. The reason I struggle with communication every day of my life is because I never got that binder, but everyone else seems to already have it memorized.