The Man in the Car

For a long time, I made choices with an audience in mind.

Not a real audience. An imagined one. A vague crowd of people who might notice what I drove, where I worked, how my life looked from the outside. I adjusted things for them. Small things, mostly. But small things add up to a life.

Then one day it occurred to me that no one was actually watching.

Not in a sad way. In a freeing way. People are busy being the main character of their own story. When they look at my life, they are mostly thinking about theirs. The way I once looked at a beautiful car and thought only of myself in the driver's seat.

Morgan Housel writes about this in The Psychology of Money. He calls it the man in the car paradox. We buy impressive things hoping to earn admiration, but the people who see them do not admire the owner. They picture themselves in his place. The signal we spend so much to send never really lands.

When I first read that, I thought it was about money. Now I think it is about attention. The audience I was performing for was mostly me, projected outward.

I do not think anyone escapes this completely. We are social creatures. We want to be seen. But there is a difference between being seen and being imagined, and most of what we chase only gets us imagined.

So lately I have been asking a simpler question. If no one is watching, what would I actually choose?

Sometimes the answer is the same as before. Often it is quieter. A smaller life in some ways, a fuller one in others.

Live the life that actually makes sense to you. Not the one that photographs well, or explains well, or impresses a crowd that was never really there.

There was a man in the Quran who walked out before his people in his adornment, and the crowd whispered that they wished they had his fortune (Quran 28:79). Not one of them was admiring him. They were admiring themselves in his place. Then the earth took him and everything he owned (Quran 28:81), and all that survived was the warning.

Some paradoxes, it turns out, are very old.