I, personally, grew up with a giant lack of self-confidence. After I turned 25, along with quarantine to truly understand myself, I feel I have gained more confidence/self-worth.
My field is technology, but most of all my friends are not “engineers” and I have felt I have been missing out on some key bonds that are preventing me from sharing my knowledge to grow with them in a mutually beneficial way. I felt most of my friends were of the business kind that “always had an idea” and had a pocket engineer to talk to.
But, recently the past 2 years I have been more “mature” saying no to things or starting to give low-level, instead of high-level, overviews about certain topics. I felt it was in-fact hurting my career, to not talk in-depth so I began to join discords and build up my social vernacular observing/conversing with engineers online. But, whenever an in-real life discussion would start with a topic that I had researched, I would always make sure to “correct it” in case fake observations are brought up and/or decisions were made based on them.
Lately, though I have felt I have lost bonds with almost all of my in real life friends. And I can’t tell if, I am the *sshole, or if I have just “grown?”. I have felt that I was always aware of how I shared my “side of the story” and/or reasoning behind my decisions respectfully. But, I just can’t get it out of my head that I am in the wrong in some way.
There are always things people have in common. More-so today with the accessibility to media provided by the internet. That said being a friend to someone isn’t about checking a bingo card of similar interests. It’s about listening to their experiences and being interested.
What do people watch on tv, what are they listening to, where have they vacationed recently, did you hear about xyz happening in the news.
Kids. People with kids talk about their kids.
Some of that might overlap with your experiences, some of it won’t, it doesn’t need to. You just need to shoot the shit, hear what they’ve been up to, say what you’ve been up to, and enjoy doing it. Maybe do an activity of somekind while your at it, maybe just eat dinner.
The age range is just when people get busy with life and have less free time to actually do things. So they have less to talk about. Work becomes their lives. That changes eventually, wait another five year period. You get settled in your career and your focus shifts more towards what’s going on in your actual life.
You should look up ‘speech communities’. It’s a linguistic anthropology thing. Essentially boils down to ‘people talk differently and about different things depending who they’re talking to and where’. In your case you want a group of work friends to talk about work topics with, separate from your group of childhood friends, who you can talk about non-work topics with.