We are rarely proud when we are alone. — Voltaire

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Author: Voltaire

Insight: Pride needs an audience, and that's actually the useful truth buried in this observation. When you're alone, there's nobody to impress, nobody judging, nobody comparing. So that sting of wanting to be seen as better than you feel, or more accomplished than you are—it tends to evaporate. You can just exist without the performance. What's interesting is how this flips our usual thinking about pride as some internal character flaw. Voltaire's pointing out that pride isn't really about what you think of yourself in private. It's social. It's the gap between who we are and who we want others to believe we are. Which means the solution isn't necessarily to become a more humble person—it's to notice that the constant low-level anxiety about how you're being perceived is partly what's fueling the whole thing. There's something almost liberating about recognizing this. On a solo walk, or sitting with a journal, or just doing work nobody will see, you often find you can relax into genuine effort without the exhausting overlay of self-consciousness. The people who seem least bothered by what others think aren't always the most confident—sometimes they've just figured out how to spend more time alone with their actual selves.

Source: Pensées philosophiques, LXIII