Without exaggeration, people will join my workplace and be on better terms with everyone in one week than what I have achieved in an entire year working here.

For a whole year I tried my best with gestures that are a big deal to me (saying hello to someone, smiling at someone, making brief eye contact with someone) but I have come to the realisation that these are meaningless and they have not served to build a good reputation at work.

What normoids are expecting is for you to be interested in them, to ask them about their lives, what they've been getting up to lately, listen to their stories, share some funny anecdotes of your own, let them in on your own life, bitch about bosses, whine about work. Every single day these 'work relationships' need to be fostered and tended to, socially and verbally. I'm not interested in doing that.

Naively I thought I would be OK if I just smiled at people, occasionally said Hello / Good Morning, and got on with my work. I've stopped a lot of the smiles and eye contact though because there's no point. I could spend 5-10 years saying hello and good morning to people and they'd think I was a lunatic, as they do currently. These people don't understand how someone can go to work every day and just do the work without caring to know the other people who work there. While I am capable of polite indifference, my coworkers respond to me being quiet by hating me and thinking me odd.