I’ve been thinking a lot about something I can’t quite resolve on my own. I am autistic and as expected have trouble with relationships overall and I’ve noticed that this tends to either attract people with bad intentions or push good people away over time due to differences in how we see the world. I also pull away myself when my needs aren’t being met, which I think is healthy, but it leaves me in this recurring cycle of loss.
The part I can’t figure out philosophically is this: I don’t want to build a life around just accumulating things, degrees, money, stuff. That feels empty to me. But the alternative, centering life around human connection, feels just as unstable when connection keeps proving itself to be temporary or conditional.
So what’s left? Is there a framework for finding meaning that doesn’t depend on either of those things holding up?
I’m not looking for stoicism 101 or “just detach from outcomes” takes. I’m genuinely asking if anyone has read something that engages seriously with the tension between needing people and knowing that needing people might cost you yourself. Literature, essays, philosophy, anything goes.
by polyathena
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Camus might be worth checking out – he wrestles with this exact kind of absurd tension where you need connection but can’t guarantee it’ll work out. The Myth of Sisyphus gets into how to keep going when the traditional meaning-makers (relationships, achievements, whatever) feel unreliable.
Also maybe look into some of Simone Weil’s stuff on attention and affliction – she writes about how genuine connection requires a kind of selfless attention that’s rare, but also how solitude can be its own form of integrity when done right.