the audience of none: no one is watching you

this is good news—this is freedom and liberation

The truth I'm about to share with you is so simple it feels almost insulting: no one is really watching. Not the way we think they are. Not the way we've been performing our entire lives, curating each gesture and word as if we're the stars of some invisible documentary about How to Be a Proper Human Being.

I know this sounds either obvious or impossible, depending on how deeply you've internalized the weight of other people's eyes. For years, I carried around this phantom audience, these invisible critics who seemed to have veto power over my every move. Every stumbled word felt like a mark against me in some cosmic grade book. Every social misstep seemed to echo in a vast amphitheater of judgment.

The realization that this audience was largely imaginary should have been crushing. All those years of careful choreography—learning to laugh at jokes I didn't find funny, crafting the perfect response to "How are you?" when the honest answer was always more complicated than anyone wanted to hear. The exhausting energy I'd poured into being palatable, presentable, normal. What was it all for?

But instead of crushing me, it felt like someone had just told me I could fly.

I think about this often now, this strange mathematics of attention. We live as if we're under constant surveillance, as if every stranger on the street is taking notes on our performance. She wore that shirt two days in a row. He stumbled over that word. Did you see the way she laughed too loudly at her own joke? We carry this phantom jury with us everywhere, these invisible judges whose opinions we've somehow decided matter more than our own comfort, our own joy, our own authenticity.

The ancient Stoics understood something about this that we've forgotten. Epictetus, himself a former slave who knew something about the weight of others' expectations, taught that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself in what would become his Meditations, reminded his future self again and again that other people's opinions were outside his control—and therefore, ultimately, not his concern.

But knowing this intellectually and feeling it in your bones are different things entirely. I spent decades understanding the concept while still checking my reflection in every passing window, still rehearsing conversations in my head, still carrying the exhausting burden of trying to be everything to everyone.

The truth is, most people are too busy worrying about how they appear to spend much energy judging how you appear. We're all walking around in our own private theaters, directing our own one-person shows, convinced that everyone else has bought tickets to watch us stumble through our lines. But the theater is mostly empty. The spotlight we feel burning on our skin is usually just the harsh fluorescent lighting of our own self-consciousness.

I remember being twenty-five and spending forty-five minutes getting ready for a grocery run because what if I saw someone I knew? What if they judged my sweatpants, my unwashed hair, my choice to buy the generic cereal? Now I laugh at that younger version of myself, but not unkindly. She was doing her best with the tools she had, carrying forward the childhood belief that the world was a stage and she better not forget her lines.

There's something almost tragic about how much of our lives we spend in this self-imposed prison. We edit our social media posts seventeen times before hitting share. We choose careers that look impressive rather than feel fulfilling. We bite our tongues when we want to speak truth, we nod when we want to shake our heads, we shrink when we want to expand. All for an audience that, for the most part, isn't even paying attention.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked that at funerals, more people are afraid of giving the eulogy than being in the coffin. We're so terrified of judgment that we'd rather be dead than vulnerable. But what if vulnerability is exactly what sets us free?

When I finally understood this—really understood it, not just intellectually but in my bones—I started making small changes. I began saying "I don't know" when I didn't know, instead of pretending otherwise. I stopped laughing at jokes that weren't funny to me. I wore clothes that felt good rather than looked “right”. I let my voice crack when I was moved by something beautiful. I cried in public when sadness found me there.

Each act of authenticity felt like peeling off a layer of armor I didn't realize I'd been wearing. The armor was heavy, and underneath it, I discovered muscles I'd forgotten I had. The muscle of preference. The muscle of opinion. The muscle of desire that wasn't shaped by what I thought others wanted me to want.

This isn't to say that courtesy doesn't matter, or that social contracts are meaningless. I'm not advocating for a world where everyone just does whatever they want without consideration for others. But there's a vast territory between being thoughtlessly selfish and being so concerned with others' perceptions that you disappear entirely.

The paradox is this: the less I worried about what people thought of me, the more genuinely people seemed to connect with me. Authenticity, it turns out, is magnetic in a way that performance never is. When you stop trying to be what you think people want, you become more interesting, not less. More lovable, not less. More worthy of the very approval you were desperately seeking.

I think about my grandmother sometimes, who lived through the Depression and never quite shook the habit of saving everything, just in case. She kept buttons in old coffee cans and twist ties in kitchen drawers, preparing for a scarcity that never came again. I wonder if we do something similar with approval—hoarding it, rationing our authenticity, saving our true selves for some future moment when it will finally be safe to be real.

But that moment doesn't come by waiting. It comes by choosing. By deciding that your own approval matters more than the imagined disapproval of people who probably aren't even thinking about you. By realizing that the cost of performing normalcy is often the sacrifice of everything that makes you interesting.

The ancient Greeks had a word, eudaimonia, often translated as happiness but meaning something deeper—human flourishing, the good life, living in accordance with your truest nature. You can't achieve eudaimonia while wearing a mask. You can't flourish while shrinking. You can't live the good life while performing someone else's version of goodness.

So here's what I wish I could tell my younger self, and what I'm telling myself now: no one is watching as closely as you think they are. The judgment you fear is mostly a phantom. The approval you're seeking from others is something you can give yourself. The permission you're waiting for? You already have it.

Do the thing that scares you because it's real. Wear the clothes that make you happy. Say the words that feel true. Love what you love without apology. Dance badly, sing off-key, laugh too loudly, care too much. Be awkward, be weird, be wonderfully, unapologetically yourself.

Because one day—maybe today—you'll realize that no one was really watching, and you could have done whatever you wanted all along. The only question left is: what do you actually want to do?

The audience of none is waiting. Or rather, not waiting. They're busy living their own lives, fighting their own battles, writing their own stories. The stage is yours. The script is yours to write. The performance is optional.

What will you do with all this beautiful, terrifying freedom?

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