A life spent impressing strangers can end surrounded by people who never knew you.

It is possible to build a life around the good opinion of people who do not know you and will not remember you, and to arrive somewhere with a great deal of recognition and very little actual closeness. This happens gradually, because the recognition is measurable and the closeness is not. Nobody sets out to make the trade. It gets made in small increments.

Check whether the effort you put into how you appear is proportionate to the effort you put into the few relationships that matter. Move one hour from the first to the second this week. The second compounds much more quietly and much more usefully.