how to make friends when you have esoteric interests?

[eternalworm2008]

I am in highschool, i have never had an irl friend in my entire life, i never got along with others, as i am, of course, autistic. I live in mexico, the average highschooler here is mostly interested in very shallow and hedonistic activities, i would know, i see it everyday, they´re also really loud and extremely annoying, they´re nothing like me, i see myself as better than them. i dont imagine anyone there or in any place here would want to talk to me about programming and operating systems and technology in general, the last thing i want to do is try to start a conversation with someone whos uninterested as that would be humiliating.

i´ve accepted that this is my life and that ill be stuck with my internet friends that i plan to meet up and live with in like 15 months. yay for me! i wont be alone forever!!!

[grubbyfox]

the thing about making friends is that sometimes it's not the time or place to talk about only things that interest you.
every single conversation doesnt have to be about the core interests of you. sometimes it can just be about a current movie or tv show or something, and it doesn't have to be a conversation where you're supposed to "win" or like, sway someone in a direction if they like something you deem stupid.

me and my closest friends that i made when i was like 14 and still am buddies with today, we barely have any identical interests.

sure, we're all chronically online, we like being creative etc. but they like tons of media i dont care about, i like tons of media they dont care about. we have tons of interests we dont share. but we found a common shared ground. and sometimes maybe you just need to invite someone into your space and they might find that they actually love it.

just because a 15 year old classmate doesn't care about programming up front, doesn't mean they wont down the line, or after striking up a friendship.

you're at an age where you'll miss out on a lot of core experiences if you dont allow yourself to talk to people you deem shallow or uninteresting etc. maybe you'll find that they have some interests that you will get into.

but you should also take pride in being certain of yourself and that you're not just going with the flow and doing what everyone else is doing. that is a good quality. but you're 15, you're allowed to be loud and annoying and carefree about things. those formative years will never come back. which is both good and bad, haha.

remember, even people who have the same interests as you might not want to only talk about that forever. they may be into other things as well. enjoy your teenage years, as hard and annoying and awful as they can be. dont alienate yourself more than you need to get some space from idiots.

[_ghost_]

I agree with @grubbyfox and would like to add that getting over the "thinking I'm better than them" thing is incredibly important. Please work on that. I understand thinking your classmates are shallow, because I've been there, but 1) they're teenagers, it's pretty normal for teenagers to be shallow and a lot of them are going to grow out of it, and 2) having obscure interests doesn't actually make you different. You're a person. You're a teenager. When you get older, you'll probably think you were shallow, too. Making judgements about who a person is purely based on whether or not you share interests is a bit of a shallow way to approach relationships, for example.

I was a high school student with weird interests and no friends, too. And... yeah, I've learned that I was, in fact, a teenager like everyone else. I'm not even very far out of high school (I'm in my early twenties) and have a lot of disappointment in myself for who I was just a few years ago. I didn't keep up to date with the latest trends or date or listen to the same music or watch the same movies as everyone else, and I was still just as annoying, self-centered, and judgemental. A lot of the time I still am. It didn't make me "better" to have unique interests, and I'm still working on unlearning that.

[fablefound]

as someone who was an autistic teenager with creative interests (programming and tech are hardly "esoteric" imo) and is now an autistic adult with creative interests, i have to agree with what everyone else is saying: this is a really individualistic way to move through the world, and it just hurts you in the long run.

believing that your peers, people who were toddlers then kids then adults who learned and grew alongside you, somehow lack the rich inner life you have yourself, is how people fall into really unhealthy thinking patterns.

nobody's "better" than anyone by most metrics. as long as you're not bigoted or judgemental and you try to do more good than harm in the world, you're someone i could at least be open to coexisting with.

i also agree with @_ghost_ that unlearning all of that is way easier said than done. there are some things i definitely cannot stand, even if they're theoretically pretty harmless... but i just complain about it to likeminded friends, rather than shutting people down for having different interests than me.

[thide]

i had this same feeling of everyone being so shallow... i mean i think so hard and people talk to me as if they do just a little more than blurt out things with no prepress type of thought! right?? everyone is stupid!!!! aaaaaahhh!!!! and i still have it, i guess, i mean i think about stuff and i never can see that someone else is thinking about stuff, only what is told to me. and what people tell to me is much less than what i think of, so i assume that i think better than they do based off of how they speak. but this chain of replies made me realize thats not true. everyones got a brain like you... its just you know you exist but youve got ta do some talking to get to someone else too. i mean, if all you know of me is this paragraph, you could easily assume i can think, sure, but you could assume too that i just dont think. you could assume im below you in knowledge and opinion and thought. nobodys hal incandenza, nobodys going to have an empty mind and yet still speak to you with complex nothingness. :-)

[rolypolyphonic]

Gonna go against the grain here I believe but like, what do you want friends for? Not a rhetorical question. The benefit you expect/seek defines the method of how to engage with others.
I don't 'believe' other people are inherently shallow or stupid but I 'feel' it and I am used to the feeling because of my specific mental conditions; trying to therapyspeak my way out of it is bad for me and everyone. I do not have a lot of relationships and don't have traditional friendships but I have associates based on mutual benefit.

Do you want friends because you just want people who share your interests? Best to find something like a public community for that interest; the 'friendship' part need not be a priority.
Do you want friends because you're lonely and want company? Obviously easier said than done but personally I feel that if you don't spontaneously 'like' or 'click' with somebody without expending undue effort in trying to 'make' ir happen, then there is no point in having that type of relationship with them. It's just a 'you'll know when you know' situation. Forcing a relationship with someone you just feel little about rarely works even if theoretically you have a lot of common. You say you have close online friends so the experience is not completedly foreign, most likely.
Friendship for practical/physical benefits? Find someone who also needs/wants what you can have in exchange.

Perhaps it is vacuously true but overall my point is that people can have different relationships founded on different things and it is not necessary for a friend to fulfill all of those things at once, and I often feel a major component in social struggles is hoping for them to do so. The person I am closest to shares my values but not my interests; the people who share my interests, I am not 'close' to and that is fine.

It is easy enough to say other people are not, like, shallow or inherently evil but without sugarcoating it the weirder you are the less people want to do with you. Very common with 'neurodivergent' folks. I'm not going to bother posturing about ableism or whether it is 'reasonable' and one must have 'patience' for the average joe for not wanting to associate with people who are 'unconventional'—ultimately, even if it were true, it does not acknowledge the personal/individual problem of alienation that results. I think a lot of alienated people seek 'friends' as a concept because they have so few of if so they attempt it with just about anybody, get disappointed when the attempt fails, and internalise more negativity out of it. Unfortunately as troublesome as it is in practice a lot of 'friend-making' really depends not juston effort but mere luck. Some people also see 'friendship' as a solution to other personal grievances—that is, friendship itself is not the 'ends' but seen as a means for some other goal, or even a bandage for generic misery. Then they get frustrated that the friendship is not satisfactory, because they didn't really want the specific friendship to begin with. They want only something that it supposedly represents.

I think it helps to identify the things one values the most and what one can put up with/wants out of others (and this is something that is often not as obvious as it sounds), because it helps narrow down what exactly you want out of other people. In forming relationships it is important to engage with the other person as the person they are and not as the nebulous component slotted into the 'friend' role, even if the other person is not somebody you are close to. It is not just out of respecting other people as having their own individuality outside of one's relationship to them, but just on a personal level it is just less annoying to deal with when one doesn't try to mentally shoehorn other people into an 'archetype' of sorts.