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,” what they actually may be thinking is, “That sweater would look nice on me.” I once called this the man-in-the-car-paradox: When you see someone driving a nice car, rarely do you think, “Wow, that driver is cool.” What you think is, “If I drove that car, people would think I’m cool.” Do you see the irony?
When you’re truly independent you rid yourself of this silly burden. It can be such a relief when you do. Only when you stop caring what strangers might think of you do you realize how much effort you may have previously put into their validation.
But also:
Independence does not mean you don’t care what anyone thinks of you. It means that you strategically decide whose attention you seek.
When you independently choose who you want to include in your small circle of life, the actions you take, the work you pursue, and even the values you hold can completely flip. Rather than trying to appease everyone (foolish, impossible) you select the life you want to live and focus your attention on a smaller group of people whose love and support you deeply desire.