Serious question from a non nruridivergent. Why don’t you tell the truth? What’s wrong with that?

Sorry, just for me to understand because I have no experience

Because it will make people uncomfortable and we will be scolded or face negative consequences at work

Then the standard answer to not answer is “not too bad, and you?” <wait for answer, ignore answer>, finally: “Nice to hear, see you!”.

That’s it, it’s like “hi” “hi” “bye” “bye” but longer

Yes we understand that but the point is that ND folks don’t automatically know which version is appropriate. Our brains tend to go through an algorithm manually each time, where NT people are much more automatic like you’re suggesting. It’s like if someone with executive function issues like in ADHD and autism told you they struggle to remember things and you tell them to “Just write it down” or “just put it in a calendar 😀” as if this is some kind of new trick they haven’t thought of. The point of this post is to highlight one of the many ways that things are more difficult, challenging, exhausting, annoying, frustrating for ND people. This is one of hundreds of daily examples where ND people have to manually go through the mental list of appropriate social protocol that for NT is just somehow magically instinctual. Imagine if for every thing you did all day you couldn’t remember how to do it or even what to do when and instead had to manually pull up a check list of steps to take to accomplish that thing, but also the pencil you used to write the list has been smudged so you can’t really read everything on the list, and when you wrote the list you misunderstood the instructions so the check list is unreliably correct. And the check list has sub points so if this then that, else this other thing. So every thing you need to do every day of your life instead of being automatically pulled up subconsciously by your brain and just done, you had to go through this list and figure out each step new each time. For ND people, to varying extents, this is how we live for real.

I struggle to remember things a loooot, and actually a calendar with multiple notifications really helps. It’s a trick to overcome the struggle. Same way as I struggle to write by hand, so writing with a simple text editor (emacs, vscode) in full screen mode helps me a lot. Another trick that works

I am old enough that adhd wasn’t even a thing where I come from.

What I am trying to say is that there is an easy algorithm to apply in this case that can be implemented:

if interlocutor.type in ("parent", "medical doctor"): return explain() else: return "not too bad, and you?"

I am not saying this will help you or anyone, but this is the algorithm I use

We all know what to say. Since you didn’t understand anything I just said I’m tapping out. Please don’t comment in here again until you’ve taken more time to read and listen and observe.