I can see why you feel uncomfortable divulging information about yourself with the way that you perceive people's motivations.


The way you state the above to me, says a lot about your perceptions. Although your wording seems to say that you acknowledge that "most people" are just making conversations, your follow up seems to emphasize what you generally think people are motivated by and that's comparing your life to theirs and how you or they measure up.

In almost all cases in my experience I've found people tend to ask questions that are the least probing when trying to make conversation to fill the empty space of silence in a situation. When someone asks what i'm doing for the weekend, or, if I ask that it's usually just that. making conversation and filling a void because you're both standing there in the same space and silence in that situation can get weird. If I or, in my experience, other people are trying to get to know me, the more intimate and probing questions will be asked, such as what do you like to do, etc.

Thing is, you should not feel like telling someone what you're doing over the weekend is a personal question, it's really just very superficial like "how are you doing, what do you think of the weather.. " kind of thing. In situations where someone is actually asking more intimate questions about you, you can always say honestly that you're not comfortable talking about such things. if they are respectable people they will not judge you by that and if they do, likely they aren't the type of person you want to be friends with anyway.