Claiming to have a common skill is hardly bragging

Oh, so not only you have the skill, all your friends have it too. How amazing!

(Sorry for the agressive tone, but this is approximately how it translates to me.)

unless you expect your audience to lack said skill.

I don't want to point fingers at anyone, but the mere fact that the topic of "white lies" created a debate in this community suggests that some members consider the costs non-negligible.

People who have the luxury of demotivating themselves by calling normal social interaction bullshit probably have pretty asocial jobs.

Yep, I find work with computers much less frustrating than work with humans. (But I also find some kinds of humans much less frustrating than others. So I might enjoy working with the filtered subset, or having a possibility to filter out the most frustrating clients.)

The meaning of "normal social interaction" depends on the kind of people you interact with. What's normal in one group may be weird in another. Sure, some things also correlate between the groups, and it's a good idea to improve in those. And the cost of having the interaction is often worth paying. Still, the cost is there, and if it's far from zero (for me, it is), it has to be included in the calculation.