What few clues given above lead me to believe that if you were to fix your ability to perform "primate pack-bonding rituals" correctly, a lot of this would go away. We are social creatures, and it sounds like for all your rationalization, social interaction is a significant driver for you.

Assuming this is the case, the short answer is that those ritual skills are learnable, and there's a ton of material on how to do so out on the web. Cognitive therapy may also help; however, in the end, you're just going to have to get up, get out, experiment with rituals and fail a lot to figure out how they work. You can't just learn it reading from books and the web. You have to actually go out and go through the actions, just like learning a martial art.

That's what I did. I still view people as machinery, as you probably do. But they're at least interesting machinery, and I know the interfaces well enough to do interesting things with them, including get the positive feedback that helps me maintain my outlook.