I used to like more people and to just be able to go up to people and talk to them.

When I was very young I was extremely outgoing. That stopped sometime during elementary school, I don't really remember when exactly, but it was because I was naive and trusting and people would take advantage of me (stealing stuff from me, copying homework, pranks and "jokes"). I moved to a different town in middle school and was pseudo popular for a year, in that everyone was nice to me and would talk with me. I lapsed back into idealism, and then ended up having no friends again because no one really liked me, they just liked being associated with the novelty that was the new kid. High school was a gradual process wherein I became less and less popular up to the beginning of my senior year, when I began to regain ground. In college I'm isolated.

The people I like are simultaneously independent free-thinkers and compassionate. There's tension between the two, but it produces interesting people. My favorite person in the world is my little brother who is one year younger than me, he is hilarious in a highbrow intellectual way and always able to find my blind spots and more factually knowledgeable than me, so he corrects me. (My intellectual strength is that I'm good at understanding how different concepts interact and at generating strategies for argumentation. It's not that he totally dominates me in intellectual discussions, but that I move the discussion forward and he stops it from moving towards the wrong areas.) He shares most of my values and traits except that he's a harder worker, simultaneously better and worse at social things, and he's less selfish. He's ridiculously awesome.

I like people less because social norms have grown more complicated as I grew older and I prefer authenticity, I think. Also, the less time I spend socializing, the less knowledge I have about social norms, and there's a feedback loop. Additionally, I think many social norms are morally wrong and I'm not willing to engage in them.

I've read and now reread that post of yours. However, I don't think I'll be able to use any of the advice you give unless I'm encountering these other people often, and there's sort of a chicken and egg situation here because I'm unable to maintain prolonged interaction with people I dislike. I also don't think that liking the people would be sufficient to solve my problem, because other people would still dislike me unless I engaged in the kind of behavior that I hate.

There's also a problem because, now that I think about it, I'm having a hard time identifying positive traits with anyone who I've been interacting with, except for the trait of humor. The primary values I've listed above, the ones that determine who I really like to be friends with, are values I don't associate with anyone here (okay, technically there are two people who I would like to get to know better. That raises logistical issues related to my lack of social skill generally though. And despite those two people, it's still bad that I don't like more people.)

Overall, I'm frustrated that I have this strong desire to connect with people, but yet almost all of the people available for me to connect with are people who wouldn't want to or be able connect with me and who I wouldn't want to or be able to connect with.