Just like you say, that it is much more likely, that the author is missing social skills, one could now make a similarly baseless claim: "Most likely you have o

Just like you say, that it is much more likely, that the author is missing social skills, one could now make a similarly baseless claim: "Most likely you have over time become less sharp and less of an intellectual, so that you now accept the useless small talk and accept wasting time." Just to give you in impression of how it might feel, what you wrote about the author. So lets just stop assuming things about the author. Out of some people, you will not get any original ideas, interesting thoughts. It is you, who needs to push them towards any interesting topic and even then they might derail it into unimportance or uninteresting ways. Yes, a person is in front of you, with a whole life experience, but there are questions to be considered, when comparing to a book: (1) Is that person in front of you able to communicate and share any meaningful information from that whole life of experiences? Have they thought about stuff in depth before, so that they can share some quintessence in the short time, that you talk with them, before the conversation walks on to more lighthearted topics with the next person at the table? (2) In a meaningful book, the author has firstly recognized, that there is something meaningful to write about, something to share. This might not be the case for a random person at a party. The person at the party might not even know, that anything they experienced is worth sharing or what those things are. (3) Hopefully a good book will be written with carefully chosen words, that most precisely convey the ideas, that they author had. It is very difficult to achieve anything close to that in some small talk. (4) Who is willing to lend you their ear and talk for prolonged duration on a party, when there are probably many other people around? That already is some precondition, which might not be fulfilled at any random party.