> I am drawing out the explanation way more than they expected to be necessary. The social norm is to think or at least act like you understand immediately when you really don't.
I have wrestled with this since I was a child. For a long time I felt I was frequently missing information everyone else was picking up on (which was surely true in some cases, but not all)-- it even led to a brief delusion where I became paranoid about a large subpopulation of telepaths living alongside us, with access to their own hidden world containing significantly richer detail and depth, who pitied disadvantaged individuals like me.
Turns out a whole lot of people have simply felt forced into faking deeper understanding due to pressures of social competition, and gotten really good at it. Like an arms race of bullshitting. A facade of wisdom and knowledge.
Like you, I've often been accused of 'over-explaining' - which many do in fact find annoying - but we only do it because we've found it's necessary to avoid miscommunication.
So, thanks for writing your comment, I feel slightly better about the situation now.
I have wrestled with this since I was a child. For a long time I felt I was frequently missing information everyone else was picking up on (which was surely true in some cases, but not all)-- it even led to a brief delusion where I became paranoid about a large subpopulation of telepaths living alongside us, with access to their own hidden world containing significantly richer detail and depth, who pitied disadvantaged individuals like me.
Turns out a whole lot of people have simply felt forced into faking deeper understanding due to pressures of social competition, and gotten really good at it. Like an arms race of bullshitting. A facade of wisdom and knowledge.
Like you, I've often been accused of 'over-explaining' - which many do in fact find annoying - but we only do it because we've found it's necessary to avoid miscommunication.
So, thanks for writing your comment, I feel slightly better about the situation now.