Well, 2026 has just started and my autistic ass has already learned a few new social patterns. Had some truly surprising revelations and thought I’d share for fellow neurodivergents who also need to consciously and explicitly think about social conventions.
1. Emotional Bids
I was today years old when I learned that not everyone takes everything literally.
I know it sounds like a joke, but like, only a little bit.
I was in a conversation with a friend, and it got heated, and she said,
Don’t you remember X about me?
And I’m like no, I don’t remember X. But I do remember A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
And in my mind, that’s evidence, that’s me proving I did remember most of the stuff we talk about.
It may surprise you to learn that my brag about the capacity of my memory did not assuage her yelling at me; in fact it made it worse.
What I didn’t realize was that she wasn’t asking a factual question. She was making what’s called an emotional bid: a bid for affection, reassurance, alignment. What she was really asking was:
Do I matter to you?
And specifically the request is
I want to know that I do matter to you.
In that frame, whether I remembered X was essentially irrelevant.
When I joined my first startup after leaving a big tech company, I was excited to move fast. No bureaucracy, no committees, just ship code and grow.
On my second day, I pushed some code to unblock fast experimentation for an upcoming growth sprint. I proposed a change that let us safely roll out new React Native builds via CodePush to a subset of users, without waiting on full App Store releases.
The response came back from a senior engineer: “This is going to orphan old App Store installs. Did you learn about our release processes?”
I looked for the relevant docs. There weren’t any.
They continued: “There were a lot of decisions made to get us to this point, it’s not a vanilla CodePush setup.”
I asked where those decisions were documented. Slack threads? A design doc? Pull requests? There was nothing, just institutional memory.
You don’t get to take unlimited big bets in a single lifetime. You get a small number of windows where risk tolerance, energy, capital, and conviction align.
In The Black Swan Nassim Taleb frames this as asymmetric exposure to unlimited upside with limited downside. And startups are one of the clearest modern mechanisms for that kind of asymmetry. But what’s often missed is that these opportunities are finite. You can’t swing endlessly. Most of life is spent accumulating the resources—knowledge, capital, relationships—that make the next swing possible.
What follows are six moments where those resources briefly line up.
I thought I was cool
Walking to Equinox Soho
In my Canada Goose
At 0 degrees in the Manhattan Winter
Only for my panache to crumple instantly
As a pleasant cigarette smoke wafted into my nose
From a nameless dark man
In a thrifted French beret
And cheap leather jacket
Eclipsing me like I was nothing
As he read Poe out of a hardback
Draped on the ground
Over the nondescript metal stairs
Between John Fluevog and Prince Street Pizza
Effortless
Maybe here he had found the meaning of life
And the Equinox was fucking closed
I’ve been chatting with a few female friends about dating.
Dating in New York, they say, feels like every guy operates with the emotional depth of a vending machine: Insert coin, select option A (situationship) or B (serious), dispense relationship if available.
Meanwhile, I’ve had conversations with guys who brag about “only doing long-term relationships” as if it’s a personality trait, a mark of maturity, and “situationships” are beneath them. There’s some cognitive dissonance between these two observations, and it got me thinking about how I understood relationships when I was younger, and how I suspect many men still do.
I think for a lot of men their understanding of relationships stops developing shortly after high school.
