Neurotypical psychology is deep, complex, and fascinating. They devote significant brainpower to constantly evaluating and testing other people's behavior against a constantly evolving set of rules in order to ascertain whether they are a member of the neurotypical's tribe or ingroup. The rules have to change and evolve because ingroup members will be able to predict how they will change, and so catch any outgroupers who have heretofore successfully infiltrated the ingroup. It's like you have a monster CPU with a lot of cores, and then devote half (or more!) of those cores to the world's most elaborate DRM scheme. We benefit because much of that CPU power is in us freed to do other exciting things, like programming or particle physics; but we also suffer because most of the people around us cannot attest that we are legitimate humans running a legitimate copy of the human OS.
Relatedly, I love Japan and I love the Japanese people but... Japanese society has one of the most elaborate, impenetrable set of social rules in the world. If you want to know why hikikomori are such a thing there, it's simple, really: so many more people are frustrated with their failure to conform to the elaborate ruleset it takes to simply be Japanese and tired of being flagged as impostors in that game of Among Us that they simply give up and withdraw into whatever brings them comfort.
I would have thought the main performance bottle neck to social calibration would be the unspoken mind-reading requirement that seems to be prevalent in American society.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but from what I know of Japanese society is that it's pretty blunt in its expectations. So there isn't this "mental searching tax" to make the "right" social choice that seems to be de riguer in the States. Everyday behavior in Japanese society has explicit procedures that don't change all that much.
As I understand it, social failure in Japan is result of one of two things: The inability/lack of interest to follow these procedures (e.g. hikikomori, non-conformists, etc.), or following these procedures but with mistaken assumptions as to how the consequences would turn out (e.g. "herbivore" salarymen who have done everything right, but are unable to find wives like their fathers could)
Right, and thinking something is delicious includes an impulse to eat rather than avoid, but lots of people still avoid food they think is delicious in order to diet. When empathy becomes too strong then it starts hurting you as a person a lot every time you see someone who has problems, so you learn to predict and avoid those situations, or you might even learn to fear them since the empathy creates too much agony in you. Empathy is just a feeling, your rational part can still work around it.
