The more you chase being liked, the less there is of you to like.

Chasing approval turns you into a monitoring system. Every choice gets run past an imagined audience first, and after enough of that you stop being able to tell what you think from what will go down well. The self that other people liked was the one making its own calls, so the chase removes the thing it is chasing.

Try making one low stakes decision this week purely on your own preference, with nobody consulted. What you listen to, what you wear, what you say you thought of the film. It is practice for the bigger ones, where the cost of outsourcing the answer is much higher.