Do I not have the personality for a PhD? I've been in the PhD program for a couple years now and I feel like people have a lot of expectations about the way I should think and feel about things.  Not just my technical competence, but also my motivations and personality.  I am wondering if my motivations disqualify me from being a good PhD student.


People expect me to have a specific research area I'm very interested in.  I would be fine working in any area and I'm not particularly passionate about any specific field.  They also expected me to know who I wanted to work with before I applied to the school (or even choose the school based on the advisor), and I only started thinking about that during visit weekend, when professors pitched their research to the students.
I chose which schools to apply to based on the US News rankings, and I went to grad school because it was more prestigious than the jobs I would be capable of getting.  It seems like nobody in grad school does this, even though I feel like for most people it is natural to go with the most prestigious option.
People expect me to go to talks and read papers for fun.  I don't understand how most people could possibly find talks fun.  Honestly I would rather watch a movie or play tennis.  I also find papers boring and difficult to read, unless they are in very soft subjects with no math.
When people come to my school to give talks, people invite us to meet with the speaker one on one.  I have no idea what students would talk to the speaker about or why they would want to sign up to talk to a stranger.  I guess they could collaborate with the speaker on research, but I would expect the professors to set up these kinds of collaborations instead of the students.  (It would seem weird to finagle my own collaborations because the advisor might not want to collaborate with those people.)
I have seen professors leave my university and expect their students to go with them.  I think if my advisor left my university, I wouldn't want to leave, because I have good friends here and I am dating someone.  It seems weird to be expected to uproot your life and move across the country just because your boss is leaving.
I follow my advisor's instructions on things and once in a while he says that I need to be more independent.  But if I did that I would be going against what my advisor tells me to do, and I think it's weird that my advisor tells me to do things and then tells me not to do what he tells me to do.  He said he expects me to "push back" and I find that kind of intimidating, because he is a professor after all.
It seems to me that many of these points could hit on very superficial differences&thinsp;&mdash;&thinsp;e.g., use of different words to describe essentially the same thing, or emphasis of one type of feeling over another, although most people have both.  On the other hand, taken together these could be signs that you are not interested in a long term (i.e., post-PhD) academic career.  Or not: that's up to you to figure out.  Let me quickly address your points:


  1) People expect me to have a specific research area I'm very interested in. I would be fine working in any area and I'm not particularly passionate about any specific field."


The negative way to spin that is that you're not passionate about anything.  The positive way is that you're interested in everything and willing to be versatile.  I am a tenured academic, and construing the above sentences in the positive way as I did applies pretty well to me.  Why are modular forms or Shimura varieties more interesting than Galois cohomology or geometry of numbers?  Answer: they're not, and I think it's slightly weird that most of my colleagues work exclusively in just one or two of these areas.  


  They also expected me to know who I wanted to work with before I applied to the school (or even choose the school based on the advisor), and I only started thinking about that during visit weekend, when professors pitched their research to the students.


You didn't mention your academic field.  In mine (mathematics), most American PhD students don't give any serious thought to their research area until their second year.  So&hellip; clearly not a fundamental tenet of "PhD personalities".


  2) I chose which schools to apply to based on the US News rankings...


So?  I see no issue here whatsoever.


  3) People expect me to go to talks and read papers for fun. I don't understand how most people could possibly find talks fun. Honestly I would rather watch a movie or play tennis.


This seems like a conflation of what "fun" means.  There is professional fun and leisure fun.  You watch movies in the evenings and on weekends, and (except for weekend conferences, which I freely admit are not necessarily the events that I look forward to with bated breath) you attend talks during normal business hours.  On the other hand if you never read papers except when specifically asked / required to do so, that could be a problem.


  I also find papers boring and difficult to read, unless they are in very soft subjects with no math.


You didn't say what field you are in.  (If it's math, this is concerning!)  It is also worth pointing out that reading papers is really hard for most graduate students for the first 1&ndash;5 years or so.  


  4) When people come to my school to give talks, people invite us to meet with the speaker one on one. I have no idea what students would talk to the speaker about or why they would want to sign up to talk to a stranger.


I felt exactly the same way as a graduate student.  Why would a famous mathematician want to meet a 24 year-old who is not yet fully fluent in the language the mathematician has been speaking for the last 20&ndash;40 years?  I found it very strange that some of my classmates saw no awkwardness there.  Now as a thesis advisor I wish my students interacted more with visiting mathematicians&hellip; 

Somewhere between being a grad student and advising them I began to view myself as a professional. I now know that most academic jobs are offered based on some prior knowledge of or interaction with the candidate, so having visiting luminaries be able to connect a name to a face and view you as someone who is actively participating in the profession is very valuable. Getting students to understand, believe in and take part in their own professional development is one of my major goals these days (I've just accepted the job of departmental graduate coordinator)


  5) I have seen professors leave my university and expect their students to go with them. I think if my advisor left my university, I wouldn't want to leave, because I have good friends here and I am dating someone.


Here I think you are probably suffering from "small sample size" issues.  The majority of graduate students do not leave when their advisor leaves.  It's nice for the advisor to offer the option, but it is not practical in many cases&hellip; for the reasons you say.  On the other hand, if the idea of being uprooted seems sufficiently bad to you, then the academic lifestyle may prove unappealing, because the "uprooting" is probably going to happen several times before (if!) you land a tenure-track job.


  6) I follow my advisor's instructions on things and once in a while he says that I need to be more independent. But if I did that I would be going against what my advisor tells me to do, and I think it's weird that my advisor tells me to do things and then tells me not to do what he tells me to do. 


I think you are not properly understanding what your advisor wants.  You make it sound like he wants you to sometimes stand up and refuse to do what he asks.  That's insubordination / contrariness.  Independence means that you do what your advisor asks and you do other things on top of it that you thought of yourself.  

In summary: I see nothing definitive here.  I could try to read the tea leaves but&hellip; it doesn't matter what you or I think right now.  Unless you are miserable and/or failing out of the program, you should continue on in the PhD program, both doing your best work and doing your best to be happy about it.  As you proceed, keep an eye out for both things.  As you near graduation, you will have a better idea of where to proceed from there.  You don't need to "figure out your personality" as a second year student, and I don't see much of anything positive coming from it.  Definitely resist the idea that you must have a similar personality and/or similar practices to those around you in order to be successful.  Even&thinsp;&mdash;&thinsp;especially&thinsp;&mdash;&thinsp;in academia, there is more than one way to skin a cat.