You can be self-centered and not act that way. If you even pretend to care about most people's lives they will care more about yours.

If you want to do this without being crazy bored and feeling terrible, I recommend figuring out conversation topics of other people's lives that you actually enjoy listening people talk about, and also working on being friends with people who do interesting things. In a college town, asking someone their major is quite often going to be enjoyable for them and if you're interested and have some knowledge of a wide variety of fields you can easily find out interesting things.