The Cynics argued that much of what society calls success is a performance we trap ourselves in. Modern psychology has a quieter echo — we worry far more about how we appear to others than the evidence says we need to

The worst part of being an intern in my early thirties wasn’t the work. It was the moment someone back home asked what I was up to.

Most people I went to university with had taken the ‘traditional’ route. They graduated, got a job, got more qualified and worked their way up to positions with steady pay, responsibility and a level of respect I could only have dreamed of at the time.

I had, in fact, started on that path. I graduated with a degree in business and then went into finance. I stayed for a couple of years and I wasn’t bad at it, but it never felt right. I decided I was still young, that I should explore, and that I’d go back to that path eventually.

I moved abroad and began teaching English as a second language to university students and ambitious professionals trying to move their own careers forward. I ended up managing the small school I worked for. I left that to start a business, and then another.

When my second venture failed, I went back to the drawing board, and getting back into finance seemed like the sensible option. So there I was, at 30 or 31, an intern at a finance company, while many of my close friends from university were managers at similar companies back home.

The work wasn’t bad. I actually liked it. I was an analyst intern, and numbers and research have always come fairly naturally to me. I enjoyed digging into new opportunities and learning about markets from the data. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had failed, that I was behind in life, and I was embarrassed by it. I told myself it was temporary, or 'my way back in', to make myself feel a bit better about it.

What embarrassed me was how it looked.

Not long after this, I came across the Cynics, Diogenes in particular.

The Cynics were a loose group of philosophers in ancient Greece, around the 4th century BC. Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, is usually seen as the founder. The name comes from the Greek for 'dog-like'. In a sense, they wanted to live more like animals do: simply, shamelessly and without caring about rank.

Their big idea was that a good life doesn’t need much. If you cut your needs right down, you become free: free from money, from social obligations and from other people’s opinions. They called this self-sufficiency. Wealth and fame and all the things Athens used to measure people by, they saw as distractions at best.

Diogenes is perhaps the most famous of the Cynics. He was exiled from his home city of Sinope, on the Black Sea, and went on to live a very simple life in Athens, sleeping in a large ceramic jar and shunning fame and status.

I recently came across a short video on YouTube where the young actor Austin Butler basically said that we should all be embarrassed more, calling it an “underexplored emotion”. It reminded me of Diogenes. He took the practice of embarrassment to a level that shocked many. It shocked me, at least. It is said, for example, that “he once begged alms of a statue, and, when asked why he did so, replied, To get practice in being refused.”

It is also said that he would “ridicule good birth and fame and all such distinctions, calling them showy ornaments of vice.”

These are anecdotes collected after his death rather than reliable history, but you get the point. While he was a bit extreme, I did find some comfort in this. Maybe we care too much about what others think. Maybe it’s all “showy ornaments of vice”.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the social obligation I had been carrying around was a timetable.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Bernice Neugarten gave this a name: the social clock. She and her colleagues asked middle-class, middle-aged Americans about the right age to do certain things, and there was a lot of agreement. Most of the men said a man should be settled on a career by 24 to 26.

Neugarten wasn’t showing that we need a clock, though. She was showing how much people agree on one. It’s a measure of opinion, not of what makes a good life.

Far fewer of us keep to that clock now. In 2024, according to the US Census Bureau, only about one in five Americans aged 25 to 34 had moved out, got a job, married and had kids. It seems what many of us still consider a ‘normal’ path is now the minority one.

So why does it still feel so real? A 2024 study from the University of York found that most of the 700-plus UK adults it surveyed define adulthood in psychological terms, like taking responsibility for your actions, rather than by milestones. But having reached milestones like marriage and parenthood was still linked to whether people actually felt like adults. The lead researcher called it "a chasm" between what we think adulthood is and how we experience it. In other words, not defining adulthood by the milestones doesn't stop them from feeling like the measure.

To be fair, not every deadline is made up. Some, like fertility, are real, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But the career clock, the one telling me where I should have been at 31, is mostly a social one. Which made me wonder: if it's other people's opinion, who exactly was I worried about?

Philosophers noticed this long ago, and psychologists have since put it to the test. In the 1850s, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “in all we do, almost the first thing we think about is, what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score”.

'Nearly half' is a guess, of course, not a measurement. But the assumption underneath it — that other people are watching us — has been tested. In 2000, Thomas Gilovich at Cornell and his colleagues asked students to wear a T-shirt with a big picture of Barry Manilow on it and briefly walk into a room where a few other students were sitting. Afterwards, the students guessed that about half the room remembered what was on the shirt. Only about a quarter had. They called it the spotlight effect. We think the spotlight shines on us much more brightly than it actually does.

A year later, Kenneth Savitsky, Nicholas Epley and Gilovich tested the harder question: not whether people notice us, but how harshly they judge us when we slip up. People who imagined committing social blunders, or actually failed at a mental task in front of others, expected to be judged far more harshly than observers actually judged them. As the psychologist Tania Lombrozo put it, summing up that research, “We don’t loom nearly as large in other people’s narratives as we do in our own.”

Looking back, my friends at home were busy with their own jobs, partners and lives. Beyond the odd polite question, if they thought about my internship at all, it was probably for a few seconds. I was the one replaying it.

What stayed with me most was what the T-shirt paper said about regret. Gilovich and his colleagues wrote that “we might all have fewer regrets if we properly understood how much attention—or inattention—our actions actually draw from others.”

Caring this much about an audience that isn't watching turns life into a kind of performance, and the performance doesn't just make us unhappier. It changes what we're willing to try.

When you feel behind, people often point you to late bloomers. I read a lot of these stories at the time.

I'd replay them in my head. Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power, drifted through dozens of jobs. His first book came out in 1998, the year he turned 39. Ray Kroc was 52 when he walked into the McDonald brothers’ restaurant in 1954. He went on to build one of the biggest companies in the world.

These stories helped me in the short term, and they do suggest something: the clock is personal. But the more I thought about them, the more I noticed what they leave in place. We tell them because these people eventually succeeded by society’s standards. Money, fame, a bestseller.

The message is basically ‘don’t worry, you might still make it.’ It’s the same clock, just with a later alarm.

There’s some survivorship bias here too. We hear about the late bloomers who made it big. We don’t hear about the people who changed direction at 35 and found something quieter and more satisfying. They rarely make the lists.

The Kroc story actually has a twist I like. The McDonald brothers reportedly wanted to keep their business small. Kroc found that frustrating, eventually bought them out and built an empire. By society’s scoreboard, the brothers are the ones who missed out. By Diogenes’ scoreboard, they might be the heroes: people who knew what enough looked like.

The point isn’t that you’ll eventually catch up. It’s that the timeline doesn’t fit everyone, and success looks different to different people. You get to decide what it looks like for you.

So does what people think of us matter? My read is yes, just not in the way I thought.

This is where I part company with Diogenes. I don’t think the answer is to stop caring what anyone thinks. We’re social animals. As the psychologists Mark Leary and Robin Kowalski argue, social anxiety probably evolved to protect us from being valued less by the people we depend on. Being trusted, getting hired and being respected all matter.

Leary and his colleague Barry Schlenker also had a neat explanation for how I felt as an intern. Their theory is that social anxiety comes up when we want to make a certain impression on people but doubt we can pull it off. That was me exactly. I wanted to look like I had my life together, and I was pretty sure I didn’t.

Keeping up that impression is tiring, though. Research on what psychologists call ‘surface acting’, showing feelings you don’t actually have, has linked it to lower wellbeing. That research is about work, but it’s hardly a big jump to imagine that performing a version of your life is similar. It takes energy that could go into actually living it.

So what kind of standing is worth having? A 2012 study led by Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley found that the respect people had within their own groups, among friends and colleagues, predicted their wellbeing better than their income or education did. When that respect went up or down over time, their wellbeing followed.

In my experience, that kind of respect doesn’t really come from a job title; I would struggle to name the job title of a lot of people who I respect. No, I’d say it comes from being kind, reliable and there for people. That goes for my friends back home too. I doubt their respect for me ever depended on what I did for a living.

So maybe that’s the line. The respect of the people who actually know you is worth caring about. The performance for everyone else, an audience who is mostly not watching anyway, is the part we can let go of.

I spent about a year in that finance company, moving from intern to analyst. Then I threw in the towel, again. After another failed business, I got into writing and it’s the thing that has felt most right of anything I’ve done. I’m not suggesting it all worked out in the late-bloomer sense. I’m saying it because that feeling of rightness has nothing to do with how it looks from back home. My friends and I are on different paths, and the comparison that once embarrassed me now just seems beside the point.

According to Plutarch, when Alexander the Great was proclaimed leader of the expedition against Persia, people came to congratulate him. Diogenes didn’t bother. So Alexander went to him and found him lying in the sun. He asked if there was anything he wanted. “Yes,” said Diogenes, “stand a little out of my sun.”

A powerful man, just named leader of the war on Persia, asked if he wanted anything, and Diogenes already had all he wanted. As they walked away, Alexander’s followers laughed at the philosopher. Alexander didn’t. He reportedly said, “But verily, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”

I think about that when I catch myself checking where I ‘should’ be by now. Most of the time, the timeline, the audience and the scoreboard are just standing in the light. We’re allowed to ask them to move.