I would start by being open about other people values, goals and experiences. Another thing you should be aware of is the hedgehog dilemma. If you don't want to be open about other persons experiences, then you should put yourself in a situation where more like minded people like yourself gather. A third option I would try is meditation and embrace the loneliness.
You say you can't relate to other people in your group because you have a different set of expectations. Well, unless you are unbelievably charming, most of the people you meet are not going to follow you in your world of expectations. Don't reject their goals because they are different, don't reject their experiences because they are different to yours, as a matter of fact, try to find where they are the same, what brings them enjoyment or sadness. That when you are at that moment with them, forget how different they are and just be with them, listening and interacting with them. Life is a set of experiences, and a more fulfilled life is a life that doesn't go around rejecting possible outcomes all of the time. I mean, is not like you are in a ghetto or in a war environment and your life is at risk of ending if you follow someone different than you for a while, the worst that can happen is that you end up bored. Well, that's just my opinion.
I see what you mean. Perhaps, reiterating my statement would help, because I wasn't entirely clear the first time. I find most of my groupmates shallow, insecure and often self-centered. The things they're discussing are, from my perspective, boring, insignificant and meaningless. They talk because they want to talk to somebody, which I'm not interested in (gotta have standards). I don't want to spend time with most of my groupmates so that I will not adapt to their ways. My mind already has its own collection of self-destructive ideas which I want to purge, and spending time with those people won't help me any; I'm afraid it will even encourage them. Don't even get me started on going good to them - as in, helping them come out of their shells or something: I'm not the guy; see above for reasons. Like I said, I understand what you mean. Given a good person, I would be glad to spend time with them even if we're different in views. Maybe my groupmates are good people, too, and I just haven't discovered it, but they aren't engaging me as persons right now. EDITed the post a bit; I made it unnecessarily angry at first and painted my groupmates in a worse light than I intended to.
If they are a bad influence in some way then that's your own thing to decide about. Otherwise, I used to feel like you did, but now I would disagree with this attitude. I talk to people to find the human connection, probe a mind about some interesting topic, establish common ground. The way I did this was to talk to the low-hanging fruit [easy but not lacking value], who already clearly matched what I was looking for, but what I only later discovered was that the connection I'm looking for is almost always there. It's past the universal insecurity and the layers of social protocol. The common ground is always there too, but sometimes it has to be abstracted a little before the equation is clear. We can move from the concrete what do you do? to the abstract what is your aim and what are you accomplishing? and when we find out that this person is in nursing because they enjoy helping others in a tangible, direct, sometimes urgent way, we can go from there and bridge it to our own concept of how we want to help others, or whatever we feel is our purpose in life and how we're implementing it. Sometimes if you move too fast on that it can still be weird though. It can be hard to feel out when it's a good time to segue deeper. I wonder if people who need to talk to somebody are only searching for the start of a proper connection. Surely there are those who just want to run their mouths but I haven't really met very many who want to stay at the surface. This isn't a call for you to pull anyone out of their shell though. Not really your job if you're not into it. But almost everyone is behind some kind of barrier, and some of the barriers are so strong that a real person can seem to be missing completely, but if you're both interested in connecting, this can be worked through. It was pretty refreshing for me to move from the old way of seeing people, to one where there's always some vein of deep thought and human story to be sought out and mined.
Can you give me an example of how would you approach people or build a conversation while you don't know them well using your approach? From what I understand, it's often a defense mechanism, a verbal wall between one and their company so as to not get wounded emotionally. It's among the very few things preventing people from connecting on a meaningful level even if they desire to: the wish to not be wounded again (because there's always an emotional trauma beforehand, whether a single short one or a long continuous one). So, no matter how annoying the verbal wall might be, you can't but feel at least somewhat sorry for them and commiserate on the pain they've received.Surely there are those who just want to run their mouths but I haven't really met very many who want to stay at the surface.
I've been thinking about it because it's not some kind of strategy I worked out, just me remembering (I'm not very good at that) what has happened seemingly naturally. I'm not sure what sort of situation you're imagining but I don't usually have the chance to talk to a total stranger and go from there to the juicy bits. Usually it's at work. Maybe there are a couple of people talking in the smoking area, and in that situation especially, it's easy to join the conversation and nudge toward things like the underlying reasons/motivations of something, and probe at the personality and so on. Even if it's just one coworker I hadn't really talked to much before, we might start talking about an issue one of us was working on, and once that exchange is comfortable then we can move from Facts and Happenings to Principles and Theories holding them up, and so on. I'm not saying we get really really personal from a cold start, but I find that it's not hard to get past small talk. Anyway, you asked for examples and I'm not really giving any, but I think I'll just have to watch the conversations I have and see if I can bring back examples. Making it up or remembering it is escaping me at the moment.
I see what you mean. Perhaps, I've been striving towards this myself: I've always found myself interested in why people do it rather than what they do; often enough, what they do immediately provokes my "Why?". Has any example of how to start such a conversation or to steer it into a more... shall we say, intimate direction occured to you yet? I'm curious of how might I enhance my conversational skills.