alt Hacker NewsI relate to this easily. My family finds it so strange that I can look at a flat tire and say something like "aw, poor thing". And I'm half-joking, yet... Well, it gives me an emotional response. I think a lot of people can relate to that example in particular because there is a sort of 'deflated' sense of self most people can experience, but not so much with the dull knife or a rock being split in half.
Something I found which coincides somewhat well with what you're saying: it seems like a disproportionate number of vegans are not neurotypical. I'm mostly plant-based because I can't separate animals from humans enough. It feels wrong to eat them. Not that I lower humans to animal level, though. I raise animals, or the hierarchy is flatter. I also find insects so much more amazing—and neurologically salient I suppose—than virtually everyone I know. Yet in the isopod collecting hobby, you'll find plenty of people who love insects and arachnids and so on, and they seem to lean towards neurodivergence as well.
my recent experience as an adept tool user/maker and repairer of all things mundane is that my emotional response is sufficient and planing or thinking about what I am doing isn't realy ressesary...unless it's something potentialy dangerous or deadly I am doing, and then I mainly stay out of gravitys way and/or any line of potential failure involving a lot of mass and torque living in a rural maritime area, many objects are personified and gendered, mostly female here,but the pennsylvania side of the family says "he's a good truck!" which is completely different from outport fisherfolk who refer to anything manufactured as a machine, "bring me that blue machine der you" refering to a plastic bucket, which was a common attitude in pre industrial societies that were rubbing up against the manufactured world, where everything in there world was personified by the person (who they know) who made it echos of this, everywhere diagnosible now....