[jacques_chirac]

I have a hard time agreeing with this. In my experience people's single most interesting thing to talk about is themselves. Once you notice that, you see it everywhere. It's such a lure, it's almost irresistible. I've made it a habit to ask them a couple of open questions and then just let them have at it. In a few situations folks lost business with me simply because they were too preoccupied with talking about themselves to simply ask "so... how about you? what do you do?"

It follows that whenever someone has an obsession, it comes up naturally while they talk about themselves.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't think it follows. Obsession about a niche topic + good social sense = you're not likely to mention it during random conversations with regular people.

[brokenmachine]

Personally I don't often like to talk about my obsessions with random people.

I find that talking about them usually leads to a predictable surface-level conversation that I'm bound to find boring.

Usually it's only with other experts that I can have an interesting conversation about the details of something I'm very familiar with.

[watwut]

When you ask me open ended question and I am able to talk about that topic, I will talk about that topic. If people ask me about family I talk about family, if people ask me about work I talk about work and if they ask me about sport I talk about sport.

It has nothing to do with what I find most interesting to talk about. It has to do with me assuming that this is what you want to talk about, since you asked about it.

I also kind of expect the person I talk to make own pronouncements about the topic they started, without having to ask "what about you". When I am asking "what about you", it is usually admission that this is not going well, conversation feels one sided and I am desperately trying to make it two sided so I am not the asshole there.

[StuffedParrot]

People answering questions does not imply that their favorite thing to talk about is themselves. It’s simply an easy venue to conversation when you don’t know the other person.

[jacques_chirac]

>People answering questions does not imply that their favorite thing to talk about is themselves.

Nor does what I said imply your assertion.