Are you living by someone else’s rules? These 7 signs say yes

I spent most of my twenties convinced I was this free-thinking rebel who made his own rules.

I traveled, worked odd jobs, questioned everything. I was the guy who’d roll his eyes at people following conventional paths.

Then one day I caught myself automatically reaching for my phone the second I woke up, scrolling through the same apps in the same order, getting stressed about the same meaningless metrics. I realized I’d traded one set of rules for another—just swapped my parents’ expectations for Silicon Valley’s dopamine algorithms.

That moment messed with my head. How many of us think we’re living authentically when we’re actually just dancing to a different puppet master’s tune?

We might rebel against some expectations while blindly following others, never stopping to ask which choices are actually ours.

Here’s what I’ve learned: most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. These borrowed rules get so deep under our skin that they start feeling like our own ideas. But they’re not. They’re just hand-me-down programming, and spotting this stuff is your ticket out.

1. You seek approval before making decisions

When you’re about to make a decision, your brain doesn’t check in with you first. Instead, it starts running through what everyone else will think.

Your parents, your friends, random people on the internet—everyone gets a vote except you.

This shows up everywhere. You want to switch careers but worry people will think you’re flaky.

You stay in a dead-end relationship because breaking up feels “mean.”

You buy stuff you don’t even want just to keep up appearances.

But here’s the thing—you’re basically letting other people run your life. It’s like hiring a committee to make all your choices, except somehow you don’t get a seat at the table.

Psychologists have a fancy term for this: external locus of control. Basically, it means you think outside forces control your life instead of you.

When you’re constantly seeking approval, you’re telling yourself that everyone else knows what’s best for you better than you do.

2. Your goals feel hollow or borrowed

You’re chasing things that look great on Instagram but leave you feeling hollow inside.

The promotion everyone says you should want. The house in the “good” part of town. The relationship that checks all the right boxes but makes you feel like you’re suffocating.

These borrowed dreams are weird because even when you get them, you feel nothing. It’s like wearing clothes that technically fit but feel completely wrong on your body.

I was reading this book recently—Rudá Iandê’s Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life—and it got me thinking about how many of my own goals were actually mine versus stuff I picked up from family and society without realizing it.

This book cuts straight through the BS we tell ourselves about living authentically. Iandê doesn’t sugarcoat anything—he basically calls out all the ways we lie to ourselves about being “free” while still following invisible scripts.

What hit me hardest was his take on how we’ve been conditioned to distrust our own inner wisdom in favor of external validation. The insights made me realize I’d been chasing goals that looked impressive but felt hollow because they weren’t actually connected to who I am. 

Iandê puts it perfectly: “Most of us don’t even know who we truly are. We wear masks so often, mold ourselves so thoroughly to fit societal expectations, that our real selves become a distant memory.”

Your real goals feel different. They might not make sense to anyone else, but they make total sense to you. They pull you forward instead of pushing you with guilt and obligation.

3. You feel guilty about your authentic interests

The stuff you actually love feels embarrassing. Maybe you’re obsessed with reality TV but pretend it’s beneath you. Or you geek out over medieval history but keep it quiet because it’s “weird.” You’ve learned to apologize for the things that make you come alive.

This is messed up because your genuine interests are like breadcrumbs leading to who you really are. When you’re ashamed of them, you lose important clues about what you’re supposed to be doing with your life.

You probably catch yourself making excuses: “I know this is stupid, but…” or “I don’t usually like this stuff, but…”

Those little disclaimers? They’re dead giveaways that you’re embarrassed about your own reactions to life.

Here’s the thing — the things you naturally gravitate toward are often exactly what the world needs from you.

So instead of shutting these inclinations down because they don’t fit some invisible rulebook you never agreed to follow, you should actually follow them. 

4. You automatically say “should” instead of “want”

Is your brain stuck on obligation mode?

“I should work out,” “I should visit my parents,” “I should be more productive.”

When’s the last time you said “I want to do something” without immediately feeling selfish?

This shift is huge. “Should” comes from outside rules. “Want” comes from you.

When your life is all shoulds, you’re basically working for someone else’s value system without getting paid.

Living in should-land is exhausting because everything becomes a moral test. Rest equals laziness. Fun equals being irresponsible. Wanting anything for yourself equals being selfish. You end up feeling guilty for being human.

Try this: listen to yourself talk for one day and count how many times you say “should” versus “want.” The numbers will tell you exactly who’s running your life.

5. You struggle to trust your own instincts

Your gut tells you something, and your first move is to talk yourself out of it.

You get a weird feeling about someone, but you ignore it because it’s not “logical.”

Your body says you need a break, but you push through because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do.

This usually starts when we’re kids. Adults teach us to ignore our natural reactions and do what’s “appropriate” instead. Over time, we lose touch with our own built-in guidance system.

Your body is constantly sending you intel—tension when something’s off, energy when something clicks, fatigue when you need rest.

But if you’ve been trained to bulldoze through these signals, you miss out on valuable information.

Here’s something wild: behavioral psychologists found that our first instincts are usually more accurate than our overthought decisions. Yet we’ve been programmed to doubt that immediate knowing and rely on analysis that often leads us completely astray.

6. You feel trapped by other people’s expectations

There’s this invisible weight that sits on your shoulders—everyone’s assumptions about who you should be and what you should do.

Your family expects you to follow the family business. Your college friends expect you to stay the same person you were at 22. Your community expects you to play certain roles and never change.

These expectations create a cage you can’t see. You’ve got the keys, but you’ve forgotten the door can open. You’ve decided that disappointing others is worse than betraying yourself.

The worst part is how this trap uses your love against you. You don’t want to hurt people you care about, so you twist yourself into pretzel shapes to match their vision of who you should be.

But this comes at the cost of who you actually are.

Breaking free doesn’t mean becoming a selfish jerk. It means understanding that living authentically is actually the best gift you can give your relationships.

The people who really love you want the real you, not some performance.

7. You feel like you’re wearing a costume

Most days feel like being in a play you never auditioned for. Everything feels slightly off—the words coming out of your mouth, the way you sit in meetings, even the clothes on your back.

You’re performing a version of yourself, and it’s exhausting.

This shows up in tiny moments throughout the day. You catch yourself using phrases that don’t sound like you. You notice you act differently around certain people. You realize you’re laughing at jokes that aren’t actually funny.

The costume isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just small adjustments you make to fit in or meet expectations. But those little compromises add up until your whole life feels disconnected from who you really are.

The loneliest part is knowing that even when people seem to like you, they’re responding to the act, not the person underneath. You can be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone because nobody’s actually seeing you.

Final thoughts

Look, spotting these patterns sucks, but it’s also freeing. Once you see how much of your life has been shaped by other people’s rules and expectations, you can start making different choices.

The point isn’t to rebel against everything or ignore all outside input. It’s about developing the skill to know which influences actually help you grow and which ones keep you trapped in someone else’s version of your life.

Your authentic self isn’t something you need to build from scratch—it’s something you need to dig up by removing all the layers of conditioning that have piled up over the years. Like brushing dirt off an old treasure, you can slowly uncover the person you were meant to be all along.

The world needs what you actually have to offer, not what you think you should offer. Your job is to figure out the difference.