Exposure therapy. I worked as a server for years specifically to build the social skills I lacked. People want to chit-chat about mundane nonsense, that’s the norm. We’re the unusual ones for not being interested. It’s trite, pointless, and boring. But most people like it, and don’t like people who can’t at least fake it.

Being able to make small talk is socially as important as basic hygiene. No one wants to associate with someone who looks and smells like they crawled out of a storm drain, and no one wants to associate with someone who ignores or belittles their attempts at small talk.

Purely socially, I say let the boring people filter themselves out of your life. Professionally, you need to have rapport with your coworkers, you are part of a team. If you’re going to work in a field with an implicit social element, you are going to have to learn to navigate that social element. Otherwise you’re going to continue to have these conflicts.

That means finding at least a subset of typical conversational topics to engage with in a friendly way. That means masking with some degree of warmth and compassion. That means refreshing the issue from everyone else being banal, to you being unable to integrate with banal people. That’s most people.

It’ll be weird, and you’ll feel fake or inefficient, but unless you want to shift careers to one with minimal interaction with other people, it’s a skill you are going to need to cultivate if you want any kind of success or progression. That’s just the way it is. Adapt or perish.