The Currency of Being Seen
Afreen teaches economics to second-year pre-university students at a venerable Catholic institution in Mangalore. She is very good at it. If you ask her students, she can make Keynesian aggregates and fiscal policy sound like an unfolding human drama. Outside the classroom, she is the staffroom’s unofficial sanctuary—the warm, sensible agony aunt colleagues seek out when their domestic lives fray at the edges. Her husband, Moiddin, works abroad, and when they meet for vacations, their itineraries are generous and picturesque.
By any grounded measure, Afreen is an anchor of her world.
Yet, when she sat across from me, she was quietly coming undone. She did not want to talk about macroeconomics or the emotional refuge she offered others. She wanted to know how to become a “lifestyle influencer.”
Her logic was disarmingly candid: “People look up to influencers.”
To Afreen, teaching balance-of-payments to seventeen-year-olds in a humid classroom felt gray, dusty, and inconsequential. Her brother was a software engineer with stock options; her sister had a sleek, air-conditioned desk at ICICI Bank; and she was “just a schoolteacher.” The only realm where she imagined she could claim genuine admiration was on a glowing five-inch screen, draped in breezy linen against foreign skylines.
Years ago, Tim Harford wrote a celebrated book called The Undercover Economist, in which he showed how the invisible principles of economics govern our everyday choices—from why a commuter pays through the nose for a morning cappuccino to how supermarkets subtly price human behavior. Harford’s genius was demonstrating that the most potent forces in our lives are usually operating quietly in the background, shaping the world without making a spectacle of themselves.
Afreen was, in the truest sense, an undercover economist. Day after day, she sat at the subterranean engine room of society, demystifying the world for teenage minds and keeping the emotional economy of her staffroom solvent. But in the era of the front-facing camera, being the undercover architect of anything feels intolerable. Nobody wants to be the quiet brain running the machinery; everyone wants to be the neon billboard on the highway.
So she decided to stop operating undercover. She staged the outfits, timed the uploads, and waited for the world to look up to her.
Instead, the algorithm met her with deafening indifference—and the real world met her with sharp mortification. At thirty-seven, through genetic luck and a rigorous skincare routine, she easily passed for twenty-seven. She was posting vacation reels from Bali in spaghetti tops and denim shorts, gazing wistfully into the middle distance. It didn’t take long for the seventeen-year-old boys in her morning economics batch to stumble across the handle.
The administrative summons followed swiftly. The convent administration was scandalized by the prospect of teenage boys discussing their teacher’s holiday collarbones with more enthusiasm than her lecture on national income. She was told, in no uncertain terms, that modesty was part of the syllabus, and to pull the entire digital circus down.
Caught between a virtual crowd that wouldn’t clap and an employer that was appalled, Afreen sank into a genuine depression.
Psychology has an austere term for what happened to Afreen: contingent self-worth. It describes what happens when the foundation of who you are ceases to rest on what you actually do or know, and instead hitches itself entirely to external applause.
We often misread this as simple vanity. But vanity is arrogant and noisy; validation addiction is modest, fragile, and desperate. It is not an unbridled hunger for power—it is the quiet terror of being invisible.
You see it across different temperaments.
Take Manoj, who spent two entire days crafting a sharp, nuanced commentary on urban planning. He hit publish on Facebook on a Sunday afternoon, then began the involuntary thumb-twitch: pull down, refresh, wait. Seventeen likes. Meanwhile, an old classmate who had barely scraped through college had posted a blurry photograph of an artisanal pizza captioned “Sundaying.” Two hundred and forty likes, three dozen heart emojis, and endless debates over sourdough fermentation. By evening, Manoj felt hollowed out, convinced his intellectual life was irrelevant.
Or Shashita, who sat in the front row of an expensive digital storytelling workshop with a notebook full of algorithmic formulas—peak posting windows, trending audio cues, three-second hooks. When asked what she actually wanted to tell the world, she went blank. She didn’t have a message; she simply wanted to go viral. The content was irrelevant; what she craved was the incontrovertible arithmetic of a moving counter.
For Afreen, Manoj, and Shashita, the core issue was never low self-esteem in the conventional sense. It was that their self-esteem came with fine print. “I am enough” had quietly transformed into “I am enough if…”
- If my reel racks up four-figure views.
- If my holiday looks more enviable than my sibling’s corporate bonus.
- If the strangers in my comment section validate that I matter.
When self-worth becomes conditional, the mind behaves like an insecure day-trader, constantly pricing itself against the market. A successful post triggers a brief, euphoric dividend—a dopamine rush that evaporates in forty-eight hours. A quiet post feels like a personal eviction notice.
The supreme irony of our cultural moment is that the things with the deepest real-world weight rarely come with an applause track. As Harford pointed out, the real work of economics—and of life—happens in the unglamorous margins: pricing structures, logistics, quiet negotiations, and patient instruction. An algorithm cannot measure moral gravity; it can only measure dwell time and dopamine triggers. It will always reward a ten-second transition video of a holiday outfit over twenty years of quiet classroom excellence.
When we let numerical metrics dictate our sense of dignity, we inevitably end up trading gold for shiny plastic tokens.
The antidote to this exhaustion is not theatrical renunciation. It is not about deleting every account or chanting empty affirmations into a bathroom mirror. It is far more pedestrian—and far more difficult. It is cultivating what psychologists call an internal locus of purpose: building a life so dense with real work, real curiosity, and real affection that it doesn’t need a broadcast tower to justify itself.
It is remembering that being the undercover economist—the person who actually shapes minds and holds rooms together while the rest of the world preens for the camera—is an irreplaceable human presence. Even if not a single algorithm noticed.
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