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Notes -
I think you're overestimating the quality of pre-internet conversation.
I feel like the people blaming TikTok or whatever for boring conversations need to sit down and read some Jane Austen or something. People have been complaining about this kind of conversational boor for literal centuries, probably millennia. I think about this often in terms of RETVRN arguments, that every American novel written between The Great Gatsby and Infinite Jest is essentially about the emptiness, anomie, dissatisfactory nature, and soullessness of all the stuff that we're trying to bring back.
If anything, loudly sharing boring personal anecdotes is the opposite of the typical internet-brained problem, which is not saying anything ever.
At first I couldn't tell whether OP was complaining about the quality of conversation dropping or how the internet ruined his own ability to engage in normal human interaction. People telling boring personal anecdotes is hardly a new phenomenon. And the timing of this alleged bad conversation (lunch on a Tuesday) suggests a work context, which means that yes, you're going to have to talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to in your personal life. Part of having social skills is being able to have these kinds of conversations. One of the things that the RETVRN people need to realize is that, if we went back to the 50s in terms of social etiquette, we'd be having a lot more of these inane conversations, not less.
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