wow, that sounded so familiar. I used to feel like that in my teens and early 20s. I'm 30 now and I'm fortunately over that. In my personal case, I think it's a mixture of being on the spectrum and also upbringing (.
You see, as aspies, we often don't "get" other people and that makes us feel different/in a weaker position. With time, we learn to cope with it by unconsciously saying to ourselves "I don't care, I'm better than them, because I know this, this, and this and they don't" (or something like that), basically "I'm smart, they're stupid". But this just a coping mechanism, a mask we wear to compensate our inability to socialise as well as others.
The other side to this is that with the belief "I'm smart", we put so much pressure on ourselves never to be perceived as stupid.
The second part is upbringing. You mentioned you come from a well-educated family. Me too. People in those families usually don't talk about pointless stuff (this often includes emotions). So we might believe that talking about "pointless" or "stupid" things is forbidden/not accepted. That makes us more aware about ourselves too, about what we say, how we say it and in general, how are we perceived by others.
When I realised that pattern in myself, I made a conscious effort and learned about the human behaviours. I wanted to figure out why people speak when in reality, they have "nothing" to say, in other words "small talk" and . And I think that this actually has a point. This is how people communicate. It's not about the information they say, it's about just interaction between 2 people. I like to compare this with dogs behaviour. When 2 dogs meet, you can see they're obviously communicating with each other (wagging tail, sniffing, playing), but it's not that they say something to each other. It's just the way of interacting, getting a reaction out of the other. Same with humans. They use words (instead of biting and sniffing), but words in those situations are used just to get an emotional reaction from another human. Not to share or receive intellectual information.
This at least how I see this whole thing. But the most important lesson I've learned is that I'm not better that those "regular joes". It's just my belief, a learnt way of coping with the feeling of not being socially good enough. Yes, I am smarter than many people in many aspects, but there are other dimension where those other people are "better" than me. And that's totally okay. People are different and in the grand scale, everything in this universe is in perfect balance.
