It was a frame of mind thing for me, and changing my frame of mind helped. I used to have the problem that too many conversations were boring to me, so I would

It was a frame of mind thing for me, and changing my frame of mind helped. I used to have the problem that too many conversations were boring to me, so I wouldn't engage. However, I found two key thoughts driving this feeling. First, some of it came out of my own ego, like thinking I was above trivial things. The truth is I'm not, I'm just interested in different trivial things. And that's okay, but I did need to get over myself and learn to withhold judgement and appreciate the expertise that other people develop in their interests. There are still genuinely uninteresting people, but they are rare if you do a good job of prospecting for the things people focus their attention on. Second, for me, the disinterest was sort of a social pecking order thing. However, it was mostly in my own head. In practice the leaders I respected were the ones who took care to treat me as an intellectual equal, even if they were formally higher on the hierarchy. A rare few people I know require token shows of power before they take you seriously, but most people just want you to relate to them. I had a third realization that was more functional. I am an engineer because I've always thought like one (may not apply to anyone else). I've grown up looking at social conversations a bit like an anthropologist observing a human social ritual. It seemed like a wasteful artifact, and doing it just didn't feel natural for me. However, the reality of it is that it's central to how humans function. I can't opt out, but I can try to deconstruct it into a set of rules, guidelines, and practices that I can internalize just like any other skill, so that's what I did. One key rule is that in any conversation (it's not my own phrase but I forget where it comes from) the other person first remembers how you made them feel, and second remembers if you said anything interesting. In cases where it's entirely a social transaction for me, rule #1 is to make them feel good. That might seem manipulative, but people who are naturally socially fluent do this intuitively, so I don't feel any guilt over intentionally doing it. It's very much a "fake it until you make it" scenario, because our brains in many cases really do work that way. When you pick up a skill, your brain rewires itself in a way that over time the skill requires less conscious thought. Learning to carry conversations followed the same progression for me.