The comparison engine.

"You obsess over your identity in relation to others, while your soul rots inside of you." Whoever wrote it was being unkind, and it lands anyway because it's almost always at least a little true. There is a particular state where the head wakes up already comparing (am I where she is, did he get there first, what did they think of the post) and never quite stops for the rest of the day. None of that is unreasonable in moderation. Status is real information, and acting like you do not notice it is a different kind of dishonesty. The trouble is that the comparing rarely stays casual once it gets going, and the hours it occupies come out of the part of you that builds anything lasting.

The bill is a quiet one. From the outside very little changes. The career goes on doing career things. The friendships look intact. What thins is interior: the part of you that needs the head quiet to do long reading, real thinking, building things because the problem is interesting and for no other reason. That part needs room, and the comparing never makes any. Spend enough years that way and you eventually stop being a person with an interior life and become a position in a leaderboard you don't recall entering.

The texture of things changes too. Reading turns into something that needs to be seen happening, conversation becomes small performance, and work starts being shaped for legibility first and quality second. None of this is a conscious decision, which is what makes it so hard to undo. One day you simply notice that the things you would have done if nobody were watching have quietly stopped happening. The question itself, what you would think about if you knew nobody would ever see it, gets harder to answer the longer you have avoided it.

The way out is not to stop caring what people think. That's a pose, and a pretty incoherent one on top of being a pose: we are social animals, and 'I don't care' usually means 'I care and I am furious about it.' The actual move is smaller and harder. Keep a piece of the day, the week, the work, that does not get fed to anyone. A practice with no spectators, a notebook nobody reads, a problem you are working on because it interests you and for no other reason. That space is what the interior part of you runs on. Lose it and you'll keep moving, often busier than before, but the inside hollows out on a schedule nobody warns you about, and the people watching from the outside cannot tell you, because the inside is not what they are watching.