Automatic eye contact, unreachable goal?

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Gotta get this out of my head and put this on paper:

As I am getting older I begin to realize I will never get competent in certain social skills, It doesn't matter how hard I try, it will stay beyond reach.

In the past I always set high goals and thought if I tried hard enough I would finally get there. Observe how people accomplish things in which they are successful and copycat that. That seem to work to a certain degree, but it drains a lot of energy to focus on these things.

One of those skills is eye contact while having a conversation.
I can force myself to make eye contact... but the problem "making eye contact" this way costs a lot of "brain resources".
(having a conversation on its own already takes lots of focus)

Also forcing myself making eye contact with someone I don't know seems to be extremely hard.

For non-ASD people it's instinct to make eye contact, but is it possible for us ASD people to make a routine of it?
Automatically making eye contact while in a conversation without having to pay attention to it would be great, but impossible?

Eye contact can be used as a great tool, it's more than an unspoken rule alone. If I have a hard time understanding people in an enviroment with lots of sounds and try to follow a conversation, eyecontact seems to help filter out those sounds.

Even while I try to convince my self eye contact is good thing, I always have some sort of fear about having eye contact.

To much eyecontact might be intimidating, but to little eyecontact makes people tend to think your strange.

I am a network engineer for an IT service provider and sometimes customers ask what's wrong with me because I make no eyecontact.
Even when just doing my work, I can't hide ASD features, that sucks I don't want to and can't explain everytime what's wrong with me. Luckely in my field it's not much of a problem being different, most people accept this because the stereotype of IT techies being socially awkward.

Do any of you recognize this, any advise on how to tackle these problems?

You just have to do it. No matter how bad you are at it. Give yourself a reason to do it. Like you want to show you're paying attention, or you want to try to read someone's expressions. Learning to read people helped me a lot since I play poker. Even though it doesn't come across as friendly.

They might think there's something wrong in a different way, but you'll be gaining experience this time. Getting thru your own fear is what's most important at this point.

I make eye contact when the person is looking directly at me and talking. If they look away to point to something (this is usually at work) that's when I get a break.

If I'm talking, I can't make eye contact until I get my thought out. I've trained myself to look up as if I'm very deep in thought. Which I kind of am, but besides that it's a more socially acceptable way to break eye contact than say darting my eyes left to right like a cornered animal or something (which is my instinct usually--ha ha)

People get creeped out if I look at them too long because I tend to stare into space and let my mind wander in the middle of conversations. I can't help it. I either have to look away, space out, or walk away mid- conversation.

I'm all for compromise. The minute I start to concentrate on what my eyes are doing, my processing goes way down. I literally cannot keep focused on what the person is saying. When it's my turn to talk, I can't make eye contact because it totally screws up my thought process. I do dumb things like reverse my words and I speak in broken sentences.

I try my best to counteract this by practicing active listening skills. For example I'll paraphrase what the person said. This lets the person know that I was paying attention, even if I didn't look attentive. When it's my turn to speak, I give fleeting eye contact, but mostly I give pseudo contact by looking at the person's mouth. If we're talking about a specific object, such as a piano, I'll keep my eyes focused on the object in question. This is the easy way out.

I definitely understand what other people have said.
I just concentrate on it and everything else just goes out. Hearing, peripheral vision, sense of time...you know in films about autism, they do a thing where they show the audience what a sensory overload is like? With all the special effects and swooshings. It's not really like that. I can't focus on anything else. I hardly ever try to make eye contact. In fact, never. I did for a while when someone brought it to my attention, but I guess it doesn't bother me that much. I also find it hard to look at their forehead, for some reason. Sometimes I try to look at any other part of their face, and then I guess I do that staring thing.

So, I am kinda this way.
When I took a sign language class in school, we were forced to make eye contact to get a good grade.
I.E. the teacher would get mad at us for not making eyes contact when signing.
Because deaf people get a lot of information from the face.
I would advise you to try that route.
It doesn't have to be a school class, but take a live class with a teacher.
And practice your signing with deaf people.
While it hasn't completely cured me of eye-contact issues, it has improved my skills.
Though, my issues are different, I think people can read my mind or the intentions of my mind or things like that when they see my eyes.
Especially people with really intense eyes, those bug me.
But anyways, it is a skill that can be learned, and it will be uncomfortable but practice with your family and see if you can do that.
Or even practice on random people, whatever feels more comfortable.

Well if its something you want to do I would say practice is the way to go...In my case not only is it very difficult for me to make eye contact with people i don't know but it can be very unpleasent if I do and I prefer not to come of as completely freaked out by coming in contact with someone. So I don't bother with it and people will just think what they want......most people worth my time wont let it bother them and may eventually ask about it.

I don't know any techniques...I can't even make eye contact with one of my ADHD friends (who likes to stare into your soul for no reason...still I find it funny deep down).

It's achieveable...I managed to do it at some point in my life.

I used to draw people's faces a lot, out on a bus, train, or coffee shop. from the side, or someone too far away to realize what I was doing. And i think when I was doing this, I was a lot better at looking people in the face during discourse.
Presently I avoid looking people in the face as much as possible. I get caught up in objects I see, details everywhere, so my eyes are moving all over the place. I don't know how weird it is though, if they can see it, if it bugs them. No one ever says anything directly to me about it, and I don't hear it second hand, because I literally don't have any friends or anyone to pass anything like that on to me.

When I'm going into a situation that will be difficult, I've learned to "act as if....." Act as if I had no problem with eye contact; act as if I have self confidence........Sometimes when you do it enough it becomes part of who you are.

I always found it hard to look people in the eyes, as somehow I found it threatening...it's like the person was staring into my soul.

My eye contact is good now, and I learned it through looking at people's mouths or a spot between their eyes. Before that it was looking towards their face...if not necessarily at their face. Gradually I worked my way toward the actual eyes. My advice is to start slow with places around the eyes and work up to what you'd feel comfortable with.

I still do not understand how people without ASD can make eye contact so easily.
When i was two, and during my school days, teachers and parents have always asked me to make eye contact, or they assume i wasn't paying attention. At primary school i've read a story about a kid that payed attention to lips. I tryed but it didn't worked because i only looked at the lips, and i didn't heard what teacher was saiyng. The fact is that i'm mono-channel and it's hard to understand this my unability to multitask. Probably even my parents had understood this later. Recently i tried to make eye contact with toddlers, and it has been painful. And it seems I'm feeling afraid when i see a facial expression on a real face.