Comment by rsp1984

While I have no issues believing that the outlined strategies are effective, and I sincerely congratulate the author on his journey, there is a flip side to engineering "social normalcy" that IMO the author is missing:

Any reasonably "normal" person (anyone that's not severely autistic) will find there are people that we effortlessly connect with and many others we don't. It's the natural state.

Now in any sufficiently intelligent and psychologically OK person the act of eliciting / pushing emotional connection with people from the latter group (where there's no natural connection) should trigger a certain amount of internal disgust.

The fact that it doesn't seem to be the case with the author would indicate that he's more of an outlier. Based on his writing he does seem intelligent and psychologically OK, so there might be other factors at play. My point is that his journey might not be transferable 1:1.