I'm not sure if this answers the question but I feel like the older I get the more I see through "the game of life" and once that illusion gets shattered it's impossible to unsee. Much of the status seeking, tribal behaviour becomes nearly impossible to partake in once you start seeing what it's all for.

Go ask a person why their Instagram is filled to the brim with pictures of their face, for example, and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic. Try doing that while being fully conscious about the true motivations behind it. You can't - something has to give.

However, I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Sure you can pat yourself on the back for being above it all but it makes it really difficult for anyone to try and integrate in normal everyday social situations when all of it just feels like a performance.

Dream. Or picture anything from memory.

I have an idea in my mind, but it’s not a picture or video like most people have. It’s just very difficult to “see” something.

Music et al. I can recognise talent, I can recognise good music, bad music, and music I dislike.

But for the love of von Neumann, I can't make heads or tails of musical theory, let alone translate it to an instrument. I even suck at Guitar Hero.

How to make friends. It was so easy as kids, but now I can meet people that do things that I do and who want to do them in a group but they never become friends to me anymore. IDK where I'm going wrong, I don't reek of desperation, I have other friends, but when people say "find your tribe" like, I might be the last of my kind.

Time signatures are not hard. The top number says how many beats in a measeure. It matters because the first beat of every measure gets a little emphasis. The bottom number is just a convenience for notation. If you have really fast music the you can write it as 2/2 instead of 2/4 and then you can write all the 16th notes as 8ths. Makes music easier to read. But thebsound is exactly the same.

division. i can do basic fractions but anything more complicated feels completely unintuitive.

Maybe Bootsy Collins can help explain 4/4 https://youtu.be/IHE6hZU72A4 When he plays "on the one" thats 1 of 4, the first beat of the bar. A repeated grouping of 4 beats.

For me it is drawing. I think it is because I don’t really picture things. My mind is full of descriptions mostly, not visualization, but I don’t know.

I’ve put a ton of time over the years into trying to cultivate the skill, but 3 dimensions complete escapes me. I cannot picture a 3d object, then draw it. I can get away with some geometries with vanishing line references, but that’s it.

To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics.

That could be part of the problem: time signatures aren’t a property of the notes, they’re a property of the song. The time signature is the rhythm and flow of the music. If you try to do a waltz in 4/4, it’s probably not going to sound like a waltz unless you do some really screwy things.

Plus, knowing the time signature helps you figure out why that guy is waving his stick like that while you’re playing.

I get confused by this too. I do some music production in my downtime and end up just doing 4/4 most of the time.

Thats where patterns repeat. It's just for convenience, an 8th note is an 8th note no matter the signature but its how you count the beats. If a piece is in 3/4 the phrases will feel different from 4/4. So, if youre sight reading, it makes it easier to predict when phrases begin and end, when to come in off rests, etc.

I hope that helps somehow lol.

5/8, 5 beats per measure, eighth note gets the beat.

Anything that requires moderate hand-to-eye coordination.

So I was always the worst amongst my buddies at sports, which I hadn't associated with my deficiency yet... then, when I joined the army and realized that, besides running (and swimming, because I lived in front of a pool for most of my childhood), anything that required technique and skill was gonna take me 5x the time to learn compared to my comrades (rope climbing even at my strongest and slimmest, rifle assembly and disassembly, for example) and even then I was just barely passing. Then I tried getting a driver's license whilst still in the army, which was basically a gift in all but name, and damn did I suck at driving. I still do, just less so. 🤣

Thankfully I married a somewhat handy woman. 🤷‍♂️

One of the numbers is how long the notes are. The other is how many before the rhythm repeats.