There are no secret rules. Most people are simply different from you. The problem is that you care about something that you sbouldn't care about.

If most people don't find you interesting, the other side of that same coin is that you also do not find them interesting. Not really and not for long. For you to be interesting to most people, you would have to be uninteresting to yourself. You would have to waste many hours of your life thinking about and doing things you aren't actually interested in doing. You would have to fake having attitudes and reactions you don't actually have.

Fuck most people and find your own honest society among more select communities. There are countless out there and today with the internet they are effortless to find. And this does not mean only living on the internet, I mean this makes it easier to find the right other people to spend time with irl.

My own examples are things like community theater and sci-fi conventions (back in the before times).

A hundred years ago I found an irc chat room of Spider Robinson fans who became almost immediate family. Almost all geeks and outcasts of one sort or another, and all far more tolerant of each others weirdness than the normies are. We had gatherings of various sizes irl and some of these people became real friends actually far more sincere and real than any of the normal people you see day to day and at whatever gatherings you've been at where you saw other people being social without you.

Those normal social interactioms you are witnessing as an outsider are actually mostly not deep or real connections. What those people have is something you actually don't want. It's generally quite shallow and frequently even insincere.

What good is that? Of what value is that? Say you start spending 2 hours a day at the gym and an hour a day watching sports to be up on all the happenings, and change your attitudes to be more selfish and a little casually racist and xenophobic, and more normal people accept you. What then? What does that get you that you actually want? Douchebag friends? A douchebag girlfriend? It can help with networking but you don't need to do any of that to get a job, and again even if you got a job that way, it would be a bad job with douchebag co-workers and boss. What good was that?

Aside from all that, and actually partially invalidating it, today it's more acceptable than ever to be different. In fact if anything it's almost a problem today that the normals are sensing that the geeks run things, and so the normals want to get some of that cache without actually being the kind of person that has the innate curiosity that makes a geek a geek. THEY are now the ones wondering what the secret rules are, trying to be nerds and makers by aping what their impression of nerds and makers.

But for you it's just yet another reason for you not to care about being good at being social with anyone who you aren't already social with, even if that means allowing most people, 99.5% of people, to have no use for you. Find select communities to join based on your actual interests, allow some time for people to know you, and that's pretty much all there is to that.

For instance, you posted a complaint that I have heard many times, here on the kind of forum that not everyone reads. I have no problem with you so far, other than that I find this question to be hugely pathetic baby whining. If you're so smart, then why haven't you figured out that you don't actually want what you think you want? You want society, but you don't actually want society with the wrong people. I just criticized you for this post, but, I do so as an equal and a friend. I classify this thing you expressed as a normal human weakness which I tolerate in others the same way I wish them to be tolerated in myself. To me it doesn't make you a bad person or uninteresting to converse with or hang out with. And this acceptance is true for most people in these more select communities I'm talking about, and forms a significant part of what makes these people better people to be friends with.

HN isn't really a hangout or a community, but posting this question, here in this kind of audience, is actually a small step in exactly the direction I'm talking about.