I have a little brother that is on the spectrum and he is obsessed with meme culture and memes to the point that he cares about nothing else. He can’t talk about anything else and always tries to say memes without context and understanding hoping to make us laugh. I would not have a problem with this unless it was not the only thing that came out of his mouth. I am worried about his future. He won’t be able to live with just memes. He maybe sometimes plays minecraft and that is the only creative thing he does. He is great but he will do some pretty upsurd stuff like, he will avoid his friends just because they bought a memed soft drink. He hates talking unless it is memes. He doesn’t like questions. He hates thinking. What do I do? I literally can’t connect with him. Once I will give him a piece of advice, like, “maybe find a better time to say the jokes so that they land better” and “please try not thinking about memes all the time” and he will say yes and proceed to ignore whatever I said.
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I think his preferred method of communication is through memes. He might find it validating. Perhaps, you can try talking to him via memes too.
I know I love memes, and I send them to my friends even if they don’t send me any. What I’m saying when I send one is (1) this is something that I relate to, (2) this made me think of you and that’s good because it means you’re important to me (penguin pebble), (3) I like sharing things that make me happy with you because I want you to be happy, and (4) I feel safe being open about this with you. If he’s anything like me, he has a secret stash of memes he’s holding onto until he feels safe and connected enough to someone to share them.
Maybe he’s found that memes give him a voice he’s never felt he had, a language he’s fluent in? Try communicating with him in memes and see what happens.
Don’t try to connect from where you are. Reach him where he is. Learn his language, and learn to think like him, and don’t force it. Remember that it is as hard for him to connect with others as it is for you to connect with him, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to or care.
Get him into anime
Great. Now he will talk about Anime memes withoit context. :D
This might not be great advice, but you could incorrectly use memes all the time in front of him to the point that he cringes into not using them.
How old is your brother? I’ve been hella awkward until about my mid 20s (there were complicating factors delaying my social development) but I’d like to think my social gaffes are a lot less intense now. AFAIK many autistic people adapt a little more with age.
I like what others said about learning how to communicate in memes to connect with your brother. Memes might be his native spoken language. It can help him a lot if he isn’t the only one speaking that language.
The tips you gave him probably don’t make sense to him. Trying to find a better time when he probably doesn’t understand social context well might have gotten translated to “wrong time of the day, try this one after 1pm”. If he is interested you could explain social context to him on a case by case basis an explain why sometimes things are funny and sometimes they aren’t. But it’s exhausting work.
If memes really are his native spoken language you asking him not to think in memes might have sounded to him like “don’t think in words” (because he doesn’t know another way to think) which is a confusing request and he probably only agreed to make the confusion go away.
If he is like me (e.g. talking about only one topic like tech, gaming, flavor of the day) i let him be. Caring is good. At one point he will either out grow the topic and it will be a side interest or outright be done with it.
This is assuming your brother being young. If he is older, try to steer him to other topic or let the guardian do it.
Maybe he needs to see a topic that peaks his interest.
