Moving to a new city alone is the closest you’ll get to meeting yourself as a stranger.

Almost everything you do is shaped by people who already have a view of you. Take all of them away at once and you find out what your defaults actually are: when you eat, whether you leave the house, what you do with a free Saturday, how you behave when nobody will ever hear about it.

If you end up there, pay attention in the first month instead of filling every hour. Notice what you choose unprompted. The habits that survive an audience of nobody are the ones that are genuinely yours.