I’m 37 and I just realized I’ve been performing “easy to be around” for so long that I forgot it was a performance – and now I’m not sure how to stop without losing the people who only know that version of me

by Lachlan Brown | May 7, 2026, 9:27 pm

My wife said something to me a few months ago that I haven’t been able to shake. We were talking about a dinner we’d been to with friends in Saigon, and she said, casually, “You were doing that thing again.”

I asked what thing.

“The thing where you agree with everyone and laugh at everything and make sure nobody has an uncomfortable moment. You do it every time.”

She wasn’t being cruel. She was being accurate. And the accuracy was the part that stung.

When “easy” becomes the whole identity

I’ve always been the person who makes things smooth. In my family growing up, I was the one who read the mood and adjusted. In friendships, I was the one who went along with whatever the group wanted. In my work, running a publishing business with my brothers, I’ve often defaulted to the role of the one who keeps things calm.

For most of my life, I thought this was just who I was. Easy. Flexible. Low-maintenance. The kind of person people describe as “great to be around.”

But there’s a version of “great to be around” that costs you something. It’s the version where you’ve gotten so good at reading other people’s comfort that you’ve stopped tracking your own. Where you say yes before you’ve checked whether you mean it. Where your opinions are always soft enough that nobody ever has to push back on them.

That version doesn’t feel like performance from the inside. It feels like breathing. And that’s exactly the problem.

How it starts

I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to become this. It happened the way most identity-level habits happen: gradually, through repetition, reinforced by reward.

When you’re easygoing, people like you. They invite you. They tell you you’re great. They relax around you. And that feedback loop is addictive, especially if you grew up in an environment where tension was something to be managed and calm was something to be earned.

So you learn to sand down the edges. You stop expressing preferences that might create friction. You laugh a little louder than necessary. You become the person who says “I’m easy, whatever you want” so often that you stop noticing you’re saying it.

At some point, the performance becomes invisible. Not to others. To you.

What it actually costs

The cost doesn’t show up immediately. It shows up in the quiet moments. Sitting in the car after a social evening, feeling vaguely hollow but not knowing why. Saying “that was fun” and meaning it, sort of, while also knowing that some essential part of you wasn’t in the room.

It shows up in the relationships that feel close but aren’t. People who know your surface intimately but have never met the rest. The friend who can predict your coffee order but wouldn’t know what’s keeping you awake at three in the morning.

I’ve written before about how people confuse people-pleasing with kindness, and I realise now I was partly writing about myself. I genuinely am a kind person, I think. But somewhere along the way, the kindness got tangled up with a fear of being inconvenient. And those two things, kindness and fear, can look identical from the outside while doing very different things on the inside.

The fear underneath

Here’s the part I haven’t wanted to say out loud.

I’m afraid that if I stop being easy, some of the people in my life won’t stay. Not because they’re bad people. But because the relationship was built on a version of me that doesn’t make demands, doesn’t push back, doesn’t take up too much space. If I start being more honest about what I actually think and feel and want, the deal changes. And not everyone will like the new terms.

That fear is real. It isn’t irrational. Some relationships genuinely are built on the performance, and when the performance stops, the relationship has nothing left to stand on. I’ve seen it happen.

But I’ve also started to see the cost of not risking it. A life spent being easy to be around is, eventually, a life spent being invisible inside your own relationships. And that’s a loneliness that doesn’t make sense to anyone looking in from the outside, because from the outside, you look connected.

What Buddhist practice taught me about this

One of the ideas that has shaped my thinking most is the Buddhist concept of the ego as a constructed thing. Not fixed. Not permanent. Just a collection of habits and stories we’ve assembled over time and mistaken for a self.

The “easy” version of me is one of those constructions. It’s not fake, exactly. Parts of it are genuine. I do value harmony. I do care about other people’s comfort. But the construction went further than it needed to. It absorbed the parts of me that have opinions, that get frustrated, that sometimes need to say no. And it did it so smoothly that I couldn’t see the seams.

Mindfulness didn’t give me a sudden fix. What it gave me was the ability to catch the moment before I default. The split second where someone asks what I want for dinner and I’m about to say “whatever you want” and I pause. I check. I notice the impulse to defer, and I ask myself whether I’m being flexible or just disappearing again.

That pause doesn’t sound like much. But when you’ve spent two decades without it, it changes things.

Where I am now

I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved this. I haven’t. I still catch myself performing easy in conversations, reading the room before I’ve checked in with myself, adjusting my energy to match whatever other people seem to need. The habit is deep and it’s wired into how I move through the world.

But I’m getting better at noticing. And I’m getting better at making small corrections. Saying what I actually think about something instead of the safe version. Sitting with the discomfort when my wife asks what’s wrong and giving her a real answer instead of “nothing, I’m fine.” Letting a silence land without rushing to fill it with something agreeable.

Some people have noticed. Most haven’t. The ones who have noticed haven’t left.

That last part has been the most surprising thing. The fear was that honesty would cost me people. What it’s actually cost me is the performance. And the performance, it turns out, was heavier than I knew.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.