Hello, I am a 26-year-old female. I moved to the UK for university when I was 18 for university and stayed after. I would rather not say where I am from, but I will say it is very different from western culture.
I love many aspects of the UK, and it's much better than my 3rd world home country. However, the one thing that I really struggle is how much people love to gossip about what I would class as trash drama in this country. I knew this was a big thing in western culture having seen a lot of TV shows and films before moving, but I assumed it was just a high school kind of thing that people grew out of once they became adults.
I don't want to insult anyone, if you enjoy it, then that's fine for you. It is just something I really struggle with. I love my job but all those who I work with, like 90% of the conversations is just people bitching about who likes who, who's got beef with whom, who's hooking up with whom, who's bad at their job kind of gossip.
It is personally for me not something I am even remotely interested in. In my culture if you are going to talk about someone you say it to their face directly and if you can't for some reason you only speak about what is necessary. I would never say for example talk about some random colleague that I hardly even knows dating life, and again I understand this is cultural differences, but I personally find it hard to grasp how anyone could be interested in such things. A lot speak about it so much it makes it sound like it's more important than their own lives. This is not just young adults as well, there are many who are in their 40s and 50s that are exactly the same. This is not just work as well. I play a couple of sports and outside actually playing people are exactly the same.
So I just want to know if you are not interested in gossip/drama, how can you avoid this while not actually just being completely isolate? I do feel really isolated at work and in my social life. I try to talk about other topics, but within 5 minutes It's usually turned back into the usual gossip. Is there a way around this to still engage with people? Or is there some way of finding people that aren't interested in this?
Tl;DR I am from a culture where you are very direct with people and never talk about other people's private lives if they are not present. I am struggling a lot with the UK culture of constant gossip and drama, it fills my work and social life and I want to know how to avoid this without being completely isolated.