You frame this as a false dichotomy. Spending time with obnoxious people is not the only option you (theoretically) have besides being alone. I, too, can spend

You frame this as a false dichotomy. Spending time with obnoxious people is not the only option you (theoretically) have besides being alone. I, too, can spend weeks/months without interacting with other people and I stay content. I can read interesting stuff till the cows come home, cultivate my linux system like other people cultivate their gardens, compose music etc. But the information that I absorb or generate myself in this way is very limited. Connecting with other people makes you enter worlds that are much bigger then your own little micro cosmos. Those people don't even need to be specially intelligent or interesting. Especially when you've spent a lot of time on your own very mundane interactions with other people can be almost magical if you allow yourself to drop some assumptions re: how people should be. In fact, meanwhile I find some types of people who irritated me when I was younger quite interesting. However, the sad thing is that many people lack the ability to really connect with other people. There are many reasons for this like poorly developed personalities, self centeredness or greed (i.e. they only talk to you when they want something) This makes most interactions indeed futile. So how can people form more meaningful relationships? I guess it would be helpful if more people spent time to learn about spirituality. By that I don't mean that they should join a sect or cult or that they have to adopt some crazy believes but rather that one should look beneath the stories of the various faiths and see how all those different groups who lived in different geographical regions have figured out incredibly similar mechanisms to cope with life and even managed to turn it into something great. We like to stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to (modern) technology yet we ignore "mental software" of the past thinking that our ridiculously short time on earth is enough to figure out everything necessary for ourselves in that area.