[kdmccormick]

> This may be projection as well, of course, because I am not actually interested in most people.

Bingo. Not everyone is interested in medieval history, but some are fascinated by it. Some people don't care about the specifics of their friends'/colleagues' weekends, others are genuinely curious. To each their own.

And, yeah, some people are just socially engineering or, or just waiting for their turn to talk (John Mulaney has a funny bit about that)... but it's not all of us, I promise. And I think those people are fairly likely to identify themselves via other adjacent failings of character.