@NEETzsche
While 1.5 month in, I do feel better in my day-to-day tasks, the ego definitely ain't getting the hit you're talking about from it.

@LukeAlmighty Well, them's the breaks I suppose. I also recall having gym buddies in my fraternity when I was in college. Now, I'm aware that fraternal bodies are sort of an American thing, but I also think it's probably healthy to lift your weights with other people. You can kind of make a contest out of it, again, much like a video game. There was a social element to going to the gym when I was younger, and I've noticed in the past few years that it's diminished. You'd go there, you'd try to btfo the other guy lifting while you're spotting each other. You'd exchange dubious bro science. Some of it would work, a lot of it wouldn't. But you get some good tips that you just wouldn't get out of a scientific journal or one of those men's magazines.

In your case, I don't think the social element would help as much. Because you've been diagnosed with a form of high functioning autism, I don't think that you are wired to really care about or need this kind of companionship. In fact, you might be wired to avoid it. In spite of this, I'd still give it at least a bit of a shot, because most of us have enough peculiarities and deviations from the categories we are placed in to merit experimentation. I don't regard this "diagnosis" as a pathology, as much as I do regard it as a personality trait. I sometimes speculate that I might have an undiagnosed form of this, but I will say that in my personal life I have enjoyed the company of autistes much more than normies, so I think that the disinclination to fellowship is in no small part about finding people of like mind.