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I was sitting on a bus the other day when I caught myself doing something I've done for as long as I can remember, but had never really noticed.
When I'm around other people, my attention rarely stays with what I'm actually doing. Instead, it quietly shifts toward something else entirely. Before I say anything, I'm already wondering whether it's the right thing to say. Before I react naturally, I'm evaluating how that reaction will be received. If we're working on something together, I'm not only thinking about the task itself but also about the most efficient way to do it, whether everyone is comfortable, whether I'm helping enough, whether I'm saying too much or too little.
It's exhausting.
Not because interacting with people is exhausting, but because I'm rarely just interacting with them.
I'm managing an invisible performance.
The strange thing is that this performance isn't deliberate. I don't wake up thinking, Today I'll try to please everyone. It happens so quickly that it feels less like a decision and more like a reflex. By the time I notice it, I've already started editing myself.
That made me wonder whether authenticity is something we lose all at once or something we slowly replace with optimization.
Children don't seem particularly interested in optimizing themselves. They laugh before deciding whether the laugh is too loud. They ask strange questions before wondering if they'll sound stupid. They interrupt, they overshare, they become fascinated by things adults would consider trivial. Their attention belongs almost entirely to the world itself.
Somewhere along the way, that attention changes direction.
Instead of looking outward, it folds back onto us. We become aware of ourselves being perceived. We begin watching ourselves from the imagined perspective of everyone else in the room. We don't simply participate in conversations—we monitor our participation in them.
I wonder if that's why being "yourself" feels like such vague advice.
Because who exactly is the self you're supposed to be?
The one having the experience?
Or the one constantly watching themselves have it?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that self-consciousness is a peculiar kind of split attention. Half of me is living the moment. The other half is standing outside of it, acting as an editor, asking whether this version of me is acceptable, interesting enough, helpful enough, likable enough.
No wonder spontaneity feels so rare.
Spontaneity requires your attention to belong entirely to the present. Performance requires your attention to belong to an imaginary audience.
And those two ways of existing seem almost impossible to do at the same time.