Lately I have been trying to get myself to go out more often. I have been going to a few meetup groups with other people in my city to try to get myself to socialize a bit more, because I have a really hard time with it. They have all gone fine and I have had a good time, but something that I have noticed is that nearly everyone, at least in these situations, just want to talk about their job. Many of them would literately not talk about anything else at all. I'll even attempt to try to talk about something else, but the conversation always goes back to them talking about their job. I'm fine with telling people about what I do for work and what not, but I swear nearly everyone at these meetups just wanted to talk about their job. Personally, the last thing I want to talk about in a casual conversation is talk about my job, but it seems like the complete opposite for everyone else. The organizer of one of these meetups even asked people to try to talk about things not work work related and people still did anyways. There were several people even networking one one of these meetups, even when they were told not to?
It's not that I don't want people to talk about their jobs, especially if they enjoy it. I just feel like my work isn't interesting at all, so I don't have a lot to say about it to other people. I don't know if talking about your job is just a common thing for other people my age and I am just stubborn about it cause Autism and what not, or if I am actually frustrated that I have a hard time adding to those conversations. It makes me feel really dumb when other people are having these conversations and I have no idea what to say, and feeling like I can't connect with anyone at all. It happened so much at the last meetup that I almost felt too stupid to talk to other people and just sat around a lot trying to find someone not talking about their job. Is this just a normal thing for most people that I need to get used to?
The level of focus on it that you describe sounds bizarre to me. I can see shooting the shit about how much our jobs suck maybe once.
I was confused too which is why I asked. I even talked to the organizer of this specific meetup and he told me that he has been frustrated for the past few that it was such a common conversation. He even asked people in the chat to try to come up with other conversation topics before this most recent meetup and it didn't really do much. It sucks because many of these people were actually really nice I was just unable to hold a conversation with any of them for very long.
Yeah that sucks, shame...