Oddly I have found that nearly all of my best friends come from different walks of life than me, and do different things for work. Only one of my very good friends does the same things that I do. Others, like my stonemason friend, have very different lives, and we met by chance. I’ve also found lately that I enjoy socializing with people over a shared activity, like a class. I just got back (today) from taking a drafting (ie, architectural drawing) class. The people in it were very different from me: a mix of tradespeople and artists. Nevertheless, it was clear that all of us shared a love of learning a skill and doing it well, and so it really was a blast. I learned a lot from them.

You might try just doing something different. It was an interesting experience spending the day with people who wanted to talk to me because I was the odd one out—none of them personally knew any programmers or computer scientists and they all had a million questions!