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I'm writing this off the cuff after sitting through a particularly tedious lunch conversation and having the feeling that there's a culture war angle here.
The conversation was basically dominated by two people excitedly trading drawn out and inane stories from their personal lives while the rest of the group occasionally tried making little interjections. If one person told a story the other related to, the other person had to quickly follow with their almost exact same story from their own life, start to finish with the same inane outcome, instead of saying something like "that happened to me too" and letting someone else talk.
I think there's a missing personality trait that I thought was conscientiousness, but it turns out that means something different (being organized and careful). The trait I am thinking of is more like "conscious awareness of reality," which is like, can you tell how your behavior is interacting with the people around you, do you work with theories of mind, are you able to weigh your thoughts and feelings and choose what to say next, etc.
Maybe this all boils down to rising autism numbers but I feel like this is something that is supposed to be learned, and I would hope that if you haven't learned this by the time you are an adult there is something wrong with you. Instead it seems to be almost the default human condition to anxiously spit up each little itemized story you've accumulated that is interesting only to you, or seal-clap when others do so, when instead you could be doing something interesting like asking open ended questions to the group because I feel like I encounter this constantly.
My gut feeling on this is that it's not just a kind of autism style drug or biological induced disease, it's more a symptom of cultural decay, and seems more like we have bad values -> we get worse people type of movement over time. And I feel like it could be a generally self-reinforcing thing where people are getting less "nutrition" from their conversations with others, therefore they spend more time alone, conversational skills decay, etc.
So this is a bit of a rant but maybe someone here has thoughts to debate or add onto this?
Yes, this is a common conversational failure mode. I have repeatedly requested that some work meetings that inevitably end up that way feature a talking stick. The people who do most of the talking did not see a problem and declined. They may have thought I was joking, but I was not joking. I used to work somewhere that actually used a talking stick, and liked it a lot.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there are characters like that in Dickens at least, probably Austen, so if it's cultural it's been infecting England for hundreds of years. Was there anyone like that in Tolstoy? It seems like there would be.
The cultural technology that combats it not extending social invitations to the bores, but all social invitations have depleted, so it's a much weaker signal than it used to be.
Yeah Austen absolutely loved annoying characters like this, perhaps most famously Miss Bates.
Aside: Barbara Pym wrote whole novels about characters like this in the mid-20th century. In Jane and Prudence she actually names one of the protagonists Prudence Bates, who very early on notes that she has spent her life fearing that people will think of Austen's Miss Bates when they meet her.
This has nothing to do with the main post, except to say that Pym's oeuvre consisted in large part of skewering the behavior OP observes. It's great entertainment, and often contains a wistful note of more perceptive characters lamenting that they are stuck in these situations.
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