No political posturing.
Empathy. Some people just have a brain for math and understand numbers in ways other people just never will. Others, like myself, have brains that are really good at understanding others, and we perceive and understand others with a facility some other people just can’t. It sounds pompous to say, because all human beings are at least somewhat skilled in this area, due to our species being highly social, but it’s still a cognitive speciality and some of us are innately better at it than others.
It can be frustrating too, because when other people don’t understand what you see in someone else, they question your decisions about them, and it can be hard to see why other people don’t see what you find obvious sometimes. It’s a bit of an extreme example, but I know people who can’t see that Donald Trump is a highly transparent narcissist. Even ones who didn’t vote for him and hate him for all the obvious reasons can’t see the personality disorder in him, and I find it so glaringly obvious that I sometimes just can’t fathom how anyone could miss it. But, if I really think about it, and I imagine what it might be like for a person who doesn’t have a natural talent for empathy, I can see how they just might not connect the dots and just see a bombastic, arrogant asshole, rather than the much more complex pattern of malignant narcissism that underlies that comparatively superficial persona.
Spatial awareness/reasoning. How far things are, where are we relative to this landmark, which direction are we headed, how to account for the moving shadows when choosing a place to settle down at the beach, and so on and so forth. It seems like people around me are utterly lost in space
Situational awareness.
Doing basic research on the people I vote for.
Math is the big one, and logic by extension. Everyone around me seems to have difficulty breaking problems or logical arguments down into relevant incremental steps. They either get distracted by irrelevant things, or can’t figure out how the output of one step provides the input for the next.
Reading an article before offering an option.
Building stuff out of a pile of scrap.
Assembling flat pack furniture, bbqs, bicycles, snow blowers, cement mixers. Pretty easy to do but customers will pay a fee to the store to have the assembly done.
Being open to learning new things which may contradict previously held beliefs. I enjoy becoming more informed and having my ignorance diminished, but I find for the bulk of humanity most people do not want to know things - they want to be continually assured the things they hold true are true, regardless of the validity.
Actually getting annoyed by ads to the point I do what I can to block them. I work with IT and yet a good number of my coworkers don’t use any adblock at fucking all
I use them at home, at work its my employers time I am wasting.
Executive function.
I don’t know but it seems like a lot of people around me are just in a haze. Probably some of it is ADHD.
a lot of people never develop it because they don’t have to. they survive by mooching off others their entire lives who do all the execution function for them. parents, friends, partners.
such people really struggle with being alone or independent.
Sounds like you know some borderline individuals
Cold turkeying stuff. It’s not a superpower level but I can quit most stuff then and there without thinking about it again.
Not being on my phone at work.
A lot of math things. It hasn’t been nearly as lucrative as people assume.
I read comments and someone said “math”.
Now I remember that I have a this 9x9 times table in my brain lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_multiplication_table#The_Nine-nine_song_text_in_Chinese
Its like the PEMDAS thing, but its an entire multiplication table. I can recall the product of any [1 digit x 1 digit] within like 2 seconds. When I came to the US right after learning the 9x9, I found out my entire class has trouble doing the times table, and they were still learning it when I already had it memorized. They took longer than me to do multiplication. The teacher asked some kid a random [1 digit x 1 digit] and the kid just like sat in silence, I’m like: I KNOW THE ANSWER. I guess it makes sense… the “gaokao” there is a nightmare, overworking kids and rote memorization becomes norm in China. Depression also becomes norm and suicide rates go through the roof. I might’ve killed myself by now had I still be there.
I can stop hiccups the moment I notice I have them, usually after the second hiccup. It started as a conscious effort to change the breathing rhythm through diaphragmatic breathing, now is almost like a reflex action.
whew, nice. I can’t do this. I can stop the sneezing reflex though
That one is hard! For me it’s the same level as a yawn.
It’s so frequent that I guess it was inevitable for me to learn how to quell it
I do the same thing.
My wife and I joke that we found my mundane superpower. When she gets hiccups, if I go embrace her, they stop almost immediately. Otherwise, they’ll persist for fifteen minutes.
Using any sort of digital device. I’ve really never had a problem figuring out how they work and what needs to be done to fix them.