If they are a bad influence in some way then that's your own thing to decide about. Otherwise, I used to feel like you did, but now I would disagree with this attitude. I talk to people to find the human connection, probe a mind about some interesting topic, establish common ground. The way I did this was to talk to the low-hanging fruit [easy but not lacking value], who already clearly matched what I was looking for, but what I only later discovered was that the connection I'm looking for is almost always there. It's past the universal insecurity and the layers of social protocol.

The common ground is always there too, but sometimes it has to be abstracted a little before the equation is clear. We can move from the concrete what do you do? to the abstract what is your aim and what are you accomplishing? and when we find out that this person is in nursing because they enjoy helping others in a tangible, direct, sometimes urgent way, we can go from there and bridge it to our own concept of how we want to help others, or whatever we feel is our purpose in life and how we're implementing it.

Sometimes if you move too fast on that it can still be weird though. It can be hard to feel out when it's a good time to segue deeper.

I wonder if people who need to talk to somebody are only searching for the start of a proper connection. Surely there are those who just want to run their mouths but I haven't really met very many who want to stay at the surface.

This isn't a call for you to pull anyone out of their shell though. Not really your job if you're not into it. But almost everyone is behind some kind of barrier, and some of the barriers are so strong that a real person can seem to be missing completely, but if you're both interested in connecting, this can be worked through. It was pretty refreshing for me to move from the old way of seeing people, to one where there's always some vein of deep thought and human story to be sought out and mined.