Get off your own pedastal and take others off the imaginary pedastal you've put them on. Everyone is a pedestrian. Everyone can only ever be a person with human interests and the same limits of human capabilities. I realized this about others early on, but it takes a real moment of reflection to realize this yourself. Being conceited is not an admirable quality. I've very much been there, I know this, but don't remember what it's like. I do remember, that it's a tool. It's a tool and a copout for understanding the human context that you're in and being vulnerable.
In addition, if you haven't found what makes someone interesting or can't conceive of it, you haven't looked past the outermost level. Once I started sitting down with people, setting my ego aside, and listening to what they're interested in, I was way happier and realized that the small world I placed myself in—this artificial bubble of grandeur—was kind of depressing, and pure intellectual pursuits alone aren't enough to live a fullfilling life. You have to find balance.
I trade long diatribes about urban development with meandering tales from the theater industry or discover the background I didn't know existed in the colleage that I've been working with. I'll concede that in a vast, vast minority of cases I can't find a thread to go deeper on. It's usually because they've put up a wall for some reason or another, or their current set of pursuits or passions or romances is just pretty vanilla, and that's okay. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but you gotta explore the human connection. If I didn't take this approach, I would have written off everyone in my life, including one specific developer I know who had a very similar attitude. Through time, I found the value in those people and it's super rewarding to me that they remember my name after a year being gone from a relatively new city. We're just people passing through this world, and everyone has something different and interesting about them... if you let your gaurd down.
In addition, if you haven't found what makes someone interesting or can't conceive of it, you haven't looked past the outermost level. Once I started sitting down with people, setting my ego aside, and listening to what they're interested in, I was way happier and realized that the small world I placed myself in—this artificial bubble of grandeur—was kind of depressing, and pure intellectual pursuits alone aren't enough to live a fullfilling life. You have to find balance.
I trade long diatribes about urban development with meandering tales from the theater industry or discover the background I didn't know existed in the colleage that I've been working with. I'll concede that in a vast, vast minority of cases I can't find a thread to go deeper on. It's usually because they've put up a wall for some reason or another, or their current set of pursuits or passions or romances is just pretty vanilla, and that's okay. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but you gotta explore the human connection. If I didn't take this approach, I would have written off everyone in my life, including one specific developer I know who had a very similar attitude. Through time, I found the value in those people and it's super rewarding to me that they remember my name after a year being gone from a relatively new city. We're just people passing through this world, and everyone has something different and interesting about them... if you let your gaurd down.