When you’re independent you feel less desire to impress strangers, which can be an enormous financial and psychological cost. The wild thing about all this effort is how easy it is to overestimate how much other people are thinking about you. No one is thinking about you as much as you are. They are too busy thinking about themselves. Even when people are thinking about you, they often do it just to contextualize their own life. When someone looks at you and thinks, “I like her sweater,...
