11 Habits That Are Secretly Making You Look Cheap (Even If You're Not)

Have you ever noticed women or girls carrying knock-off designer bags, like fake designer bags? How do you know those bags are fake? How can you tell? You haven't met them before, it's just a vibe. You haven't inspected the stitching, you've not checked the logo. You can tell because nothing else about that woman quite matches the bag. Her energy, the way she carries herself, the rest of her look, none of it really lines up with the luxury that she's pretending to hold. Now this video isn't really about the bag, real or fake. It's about the point that this discrepancy makes in your head. Looking expensive is not about what bag you carry or what logo you wear. It's about everything that surrounds it. Which is exactly why the harder that you try to look expensive, the cheaper you usually end up coming across. Hi, I'm Aditi and today we are breaking down 11 subtle habits that quietly make you look cheap, inexpensive. And I'm gonna be honest, you are probably making at least a few of them. I know, I was. But just a disclaimer, when I say cheap, I am not talking about your income, your budget, how much money you spend on anything. I am talking about the thing that no bag can really fix. I'm talking about the signals that you send through your standards, your habits and the way that you carry yourself when you think nobody's watching. So if you're ready to level up and become the kind of woman who feels expensive and not just the kind who's performing it, hit that subscribe button and let's get started. Overexplaining and apologizing for existing. Now I have this friend who says sorry for everything. Sorry when she asks a question. Sorry when somebody else mumps into her. She apologizes so much that half the time there is nothing to apologize for. She's basically saying sorry for existing. And I want you to think of somebody like that in your own life. I bet you will find at least one woman who does this. Maybe it's you. Notice how these are the very women who also have a lot of trouble saying no. So if somebody asks her, hey, can you come to this event? Instead of saying, I can't make it, she sends a whole paragraph. Here's my reason. Here is my backup reason. Here is how I'll make it up to you. Psychologists call this jade. Justify, argue, defend, explain. And it is not politeness. It is insecurity dressed up as good manners. And I think in India, women have been conditioned to do this a lot because we are never really allowed to take up space. But people who constantly jade usually do not believe that their decisions are enough on their own. They feel that they need to earn the right to say no. They need to earn the right to have preferences to take up space. And that is exactly why every boundary that they want to set comes with an explanation. Every opinion they have comes with a disclaimer. Every no comes with guilt hidden behind it. But when you constantly apologize for existing and over-explain every time you say no, you are pricing yourself low in the eyes of other people. You are telling the room that your presence is an inconvenience and people take you at your own valuation. The way that you treat your worth becomes the instruction manual for how everybody else treats you. I used to do this a lot as well. And I thought it was politeness and I was being the nice girl and I didn't want to offend anyone or hurt anyone. And it's taken a lot of constant reminders to break out of that loop. But that's all it takes. Reminders. And it is possible. Once you understand that this is what you're doing, every time you do this, you just need to remind yourself, Oh, hey, I made this mistake. Not to do it again. And over time, your brain tells you not to do it anymore. Coming to habit number two, buying clothes for the fantasy version of your body. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I have struggled with body image issues for years. I have been on more weight loss journeys than I can count. And for the longest time, I had an entire section of my wardrobe that was just kept for the ideal version of my body. I would wear those clothes when I reached my goal weight. I have only stopped doing this last year. So trust me, I get it. But here's what I realized. All of these clothes that I had in that separate wardrobe, I was not really buying them for my body. I was buying them for an imaginary version that I was trying to get to. I want you to go take a look in your own wardrobe right now. How many pieces are you saving for a woman who does not exist right now? The dress for once you lose five kilos, the jeans you start wearing after you start the gym, something you brought because it looked incredible on a model whose body has nothing to do with yours. And this is why it quietly keeps you looking cheap, because it keeps you stuck. When every purchase is for a future, thinner version of you, you are telling your brain over and over and over again that the body you have right now is not good enough. So you never actually love it. You just keep waiting to reach this arbitrary goal where you might love it once you reach it. But body dressmorphia is a very real problem and no amount of fixing your body actually makes you fall in love with it. You have to fall in love with it first. Because when you do that, when you think that there's this future version of yourself that you're going to appreciate and you're going to love, you start dressing to hide your current body. Always covering, always camouflaging, always shopping for whatever disguises the flaws you think you have instead of whatever you actually like. Which is exactly why you end up with a full wardrobe that you cannot stand. It's a loop. You're uncomfortable in your body so you dress to hide it, which keeps you uncomfortable and no outfit in any size ever fixes that. The discomfort isn't really about the clothes, it's about your relationship with your body. And the fix is simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. Dress for the body that you have today. Buy the size that fits, not the size that you're negotiating with. Buy the things because you genuinely love how you feel in them, not because they hide a perceived flaw that you think you have in your body. Being comfortable in your own skin is one of the easiest ways to look expensive. Every woman that you think looks expensive, just see how they carry themselves. They are so comfortable in their own body, in their own skin and that is what it is all about. Coming to habit number three, fishing self-deprecation as a bait. I know that sounds a little confusing, let me explain it. So just a few days ago I was getting off a flight, I was visiting a friend, coming back to Delhi and as I was getting off the flight, an air hostess stopped me and told me that she really liked my smile and it just made my day, it was the sweetest thing. And what did I do? I thanked her warmly, I shook her hand and then I went my way. But Aditi from a few years ago would have swatted that compliment away. I would have said something like, oh come on, I have such thin lips, I smile way too wide. I would have basically made some dig at my expense to make the compliment more palatable, to make the moment feel less awkward. That is self-deprecation. And we do it for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes we do it to feel good because when we say something negative about ourselves and somebody else jumps in to disagree, that hit of reassurance feels very nice. Sometimes we do it to be relatable, we joke at our own expense or we make fun of ourselves and that in our eyes makes us seem humble, easy, unthreatening. Think of Chandler Bing, I think he does this really well. Now the problem isn't the joke itself, the problem is what it's doing to your mind. Self-deprecation is a stealthy little tool and it works on your own mind first. Every time you say, ugh, I'm so dumb or ugh, I always mess up, oh, I am a weak, independent woman, you know that joke that's been going around, you are casting a tiny vote for a lower version of yourself and you say it long enough, you start believing it. And when you constantly believe that you're not worth it, you come across as cheap because those are the signals that you're sending out in your non-verbal communication, in your behaviour. You are handing people a very low opinion of you wrapped up as a joke or as a dig on yourself and teaching them that it's fine to see you that way. The fix here is not to start bragging of course, the fix here is to notice how often you reach for a crutch like this, a crutch of self-deprecation and then stop, let a compliment land without swatting it away. Let silence sit without filling it by making fun of yourself and all it takes is little reminders once you understand it. I have actually cut out all sort of content, all sort of jokes out of my life that rely on self-deprecation as a form of humour and of course, I have stopped doing it myself. Coming to habit number four, auditioning to be chosen. Now, we all adjust ourselves a little depending on who we are with, right? You're not the same person with your boss as you are with your closest friends and that's completely normal. But you will notice that there are some people who take it way too far. They start to abandon what they believe in, what their values are, the second holding on to that value might cause them being liked or picked or approved out, right? You have watched this play out at a huge scale recently. There's a whole wave of influencers who have built their entire brand on feminism and empowerment and they all lined up to promote the meta AI glasses. The same glasses that people were literally calling pervert glasses because of how easily they let you film women without their consent. And when the backlash came, most of these theatres who build their brands on feminist content did not own up to it. They put out careful, non-apology videos. Oh, I didn't realise that this was happening or it's about how you use it, clarifications which were designed to keep the brand happy and also try and win the audience back at the same time. There was no real position that they were taking. They were just trying to stay chosen by everyone in the room all at once. Psychologists call this high self-monitoring. When you are so tuned into everybody else's reactions that you lose touch with your own values and you don't need a million followers to do it. As soon as you agree with the take that you don't personally believe in or you go quiet on things that you actually care about, you are doing this. Even when you say, no, no, it's fine when it really is not fine all to avoid being the person who is too much, too difficult, too not chosen. When you drop your own position just to be picked, you are telling people that you do not stand by your values, that you are negotiable, that you will rearrange yourself for whoever is paying attention. Maybe that's a brand, maybe that's a group, maybe that's a guy. And just like anything that's always available and endlessly moldable, you'll stop feeling precious. You have just made yourself an option instead of a person and that is what comes across as cheap. Now, the reason that we see so many people auditioning to be chosen is because we live in the attention economy and attention is currency. But over time, when you stop holding on to values and you mold for anybody, people stop taking you seriously. They understand the facade, right? And it doesn't just happen with influencers. You see this in real life as well, right? You will have that friend in office who will do anything to please the boss and also the colleagues at the same time. If you are doing this, you are not coming across as a genuine person. You are coming across as inauthentic and that is what comes across as cheap. So learn to hold your position, your values in any given situation in life. That is what makes you, you. It takes a lot of courage to build this. It also takes a lot of practice. So if you're not there yet, that's okay. I don't think I'm there fully yet. We are all a work in progress and we can always strive to be a better version of ourselves. Coming to habit number five, being infinitely available. Think about how you handle your own time. Do you reply to every text within seconds? I am very, very guilty of this. I used to do this a lot. Do you say yes to plans you do not even want to go to? Do you drop your own work the moment that somebody else wants you or needs you? Do you reshuffle your entire day because somebody called at the last minute and it felt rude to say no? If you do any of this, somewhere along the way, you have built your whole life around everybody else's convenience. And now I'm not talking about playing games or being fake busy to seem important. I think we're all allowed to do that. The principle here is just simpler than we like to admit. Scarcity creates value. We naturally treat the things that are limited as more precious and the things that are endlessly available as kind of worthless, right? So which is why diamonds and gold are precious, but aluminium is very cheap. So when your time is on the tap for everyone all of the time, the message that you're sending is that your time is not worth much, even to you. Being infinitely available is not generosity. It's you just handing yourself out for free and hoping that people value for it. But people don't value what costs them nothing. The friend who can always be moved, the woman whose plans can always be cancelled slowly becomes the person whose plans are always cancelled. You have priced yourself at zero and people simply pay what you are asking. Now the fix is not to start ignoring texts or manufacturing mysterious unavailability. It is to actually respect your own time first because everybody else takes their cue from you. Make plans with yourself and protect them the way that you would protect a plan with a friend. Stop being attached to your phone on your hip. Nobody will die if you reply to a message one hour later. Say, if you are not available today, say that I can't do it today, but Thursday works instead, instead of dropping everything on demand. It takes practice, but you can get there. Habit number six, performing a lifestyle that you cannot comfortably afford. Open your phone right now and you will be buried in overconsumption. The unboxing videos, endless hauls, the come luxury shopping with me vlogs, the bag reveals, closet tours where somebody walks you slowly past 40 things that they bought this month. I think somewhere along the way in the past decade, having an excess of stuff became synonymous with looking rich, looking successful, looking like you finally made it. But that is all it is. Optics. Because we see a lot of stuff and we assume that these people are rich, but we don't really know anything about their financial situation. In fact, there are so many stories of influencers who became broke to showcase a luxurious lifestyle. Psychologists call this the trap of conspicuous consumption. Buying things, not because they make your life better, but because they signal status to whoever is watching. And it backfires every single time. The harder you work to convince people that you're expensive, that you are classy, the less expensive and classy you end up looking. Which is why you will see that a lot of people respect somebody like a Ratan Tata more than somebody like an Ambani. Because they are very conspicuous with their wealth display, but Tatas are very subdued, very hidden from the world. Similarly, right now there's a whole controversy going around Taylor Swift's wedding. And people are furious that she made such a display out of it. Now, I'm nobody to comment on whether you should have a big wedding or a small wedding. Have a big wedding if you want to. But it's really interesting to note how Taylor Swift's wedding is being called tacky by a lot of people. Whereas Zendaya and Tom Holland are being called classy AF because they chose to hide whatever they were doing. They are not doing a conspicuous display of their wealth. Let me actually know in the comments what you think of this. We are not here to judge Taylor for the kind of wedding she has. But what does it signal to you? And I'm really interested to know that. Because the truth of the matter is that real class, real expensiveness has never really needed an announcement. It's the trying hard that gives you away. For a lot of people, it is not harmless. Because to keep the performance running, people start spending money that they genuinely don't have. Taylor has great money. She can spend whatever she wants. But for a lot of people, they want stuff at that level but they don't really have the money to afford it. So they will buy luxury bags on EMI. They will take trips that will quietly wreck them for three months. They will have a whole lifestyle which is held up on camera while it is falling apart offline. All to look expensive, to take a scroll of strangers who forget the haul the second that they've passed it. And the fix for this is embarrassingly simple. Before you shop for anything, before anything goes in your cart, ask yourself one honest question. Would I still want this if I could never boast about it, never mention it, never let a single person know that I owned it? If the answer is yes, buy it, enjoy it, no guilt. If it is no, then you were never really buying the thing. You were buying the way you hoped it would make you look. Coming to habit number seven, using Splitwise as a personality. And oh my god how I hate this. You know those people who will split the bill down to the last rupee? A friend of mine had a roommate once who would put even a single lemon on Splitwise. A lemon. Such people are an absolute nightmare to exist with and imagine she was living with her. And people who are doing this, by the way, they think that they're being financially disciplined when they do this. They're smart with their money. But there's a line between being responsible and being petty. And the single lemon on Splitwise is just miles past being petty. Because none of this is really about the money. It's a scarcity mindset. Deep down, it is coming from a feeling that there just isn't enough for everyone. So every little thing has to be tracked, reclaimed, protected. And once you're operating from that mindset, that place, you slowly start treating people the way that you treat transactions. And the problem isn't that you're tracking your money because you will absolutely get your one rupee back. But look at what you are spending to get it. Your warmth, your generosity, how people feel around you. Nobody wants to reach for their wallet a little nervously every time they're with you. And the worst part is, scarcity attracts scarcity. Keep your score long enough and you will look up one day, you'll either be surrounded by no people, or you'll just be surrounded by people who count every rupee right back at you. That pettiness quietly becomes the whole temperature of your friendships. And nobody is telling you to overpay and let people walk all over you. But in friendships, you can trust them enough to let one coffee go by. Right? Like my friends and I, never keep tabs. If I paid this time, my friend will get it the next time. It's not making either of us broke. But it's definitely adding more trust to our friendship. And I'm not talking about huge sums of money here, right? It's just about small expenses that you share on the daily. So, get the coffee sometimes without filing it away in your head or putting it on split device, right? Let a small imbalance just sit there, unbothered. Friendships are built on trust, not keeping track of every rupee. Women who are genuinely abundant, women who feel expensive, they're not careless with their money, but they're also not stingy with people. Pettiness is a mindset. And you will realise once you get out of that mindset, that there's enough for everyone. Coming to habit number 8, making other people feel small so that you can feel important. You know the type of person that I'm talking about. The one who corrects everybody's pronunciation, who laughs a little too hard at how someone said a word or what somebody is wearing and then hides behind, Arre relax, I'm just joking na. There are people who always have a small, cutting thing to say about whoever just left the room. I have this friend who has this very weird habit of feeling better about herself by dismissing what anybody else is telling her. And it's just exhausting to talk to her. We have been friends for a very long time, but over time, I have just stopped talking to her all that much because it's just annoying to be around such people. And people doing this will tell themselves that they're being witty or they're being honest and they're just being straightforward. But what they're actually doing is something called downward social comparison. When somebody does not feel good enough on their own, the quickest shortcut to feeling tall is making somebody else feel small. It works for about 5 seconds and then it just costs you your entire dynamic, your entire relationship because people around you are not dumb, they're smart. They pick up disrespect and they won't want to interact with you going forward. Putting others down has never once made a person look elevated. It just broadcasts loudly how threatened somebody is feeling. So if a friend is basically putting somebody else down in conversation with everybody else, they are just telling the world more about how insecure they are as a person. And it is at its worst when it is aimed at other women. I'm not like other girl, little digs at how somebody else is dressing, how loud somebody else is, how much she posts. There's this weird clip of Rubina Vilayak going around. She's a TV actress. And it's a podcast clip, I believe. She's tearing another woman down for choosing not to have kids. Tearing another woman down to feel above her does not make you look secure. It just shows everybody the exact opposite that you don't believe there's enough room for both of you to exist. That's not a good look. Coming to habit number 9, I want to be really careful with this one because vulnerability is not a problem and you will never hear me tell you to stop being open, being vulnerable with the people around you. Sharing your struggles is not cheap. It's human. And it is actually brave. But there's a real difference between vulnerability and unloading your deepest wounds onto someone you met 20 minutes ago. Because trauma dumping does not actually build closeness. It builds intensity. And in the moment, those two things might feel almost identical, right? Which is exactly why it's so easy to confuse them. You walk away feeling like you bonded when in reality, you just handed a near stranger or somebody you don't know very well weight that they never agreed to hold. Real intimacy is built slowly with trust, with context, with consent to go deeper. But when oversharing becomes your default setting, when it's your opening move, you are not being vulnerable. You are skipping the actual work of being known as a person. And people understand that. They feel that. They start to feel less like a friend and more like an emotional dumping ground. And slowly, gently, they begin keeping their distance. The very thing that you thought you were reaching for, which is closeness, is the very thing you are pushing away by trauma dumping. Now, the fix is not to lock everything down and become a closed book. It is to pace yourself. Let people earn your trust. Let people earn the deeper layers of you the same way that you would want to earn theirs. Before you share something heavy, just ask, has this relationship actually earned my trust? Earned my friendship? Earned this part of me? Or am I just trying to fast forward it? Because the women who feel magnetic are not emotionally available, but they're emotionally paced. They let you in slowly, and that's exactly why being let in feels precious. Feels like something. Coming to habit number 10. Complaining as a personality trait. Look, we all have those days where everything is going wrong and you just need to call somebody at the end of the day and vent it out, right? That is not the problem. That is being a person. And venting is healthy as long as you do it occasionally. But a few years ago, I met this woman. She was very sweet, but she was a chronic complainer. Every time we would meet, it was just venting. Every single conversation just looped back to what was wrong in her life, who did her wrong, nothing works out for her, why life is just unfair in her particular case. And it was exhausting to be around. Like trauma dumping, constant venting does not build intimacy. It just creates learned helplessness. It creates this belief in the person who is venting that nothing you do will change your circumstances. So all that is left to do is narrate how bad it is. The problem is that agency is magnetic. Agency means taking control of your situation, believing that things can change and actually working towards changing them. Agency is magnetic. Helplessness is exhausting. People are naturally drawn to someone who feels like they are moving their life forward. And we naturally tend to pull away from people who feel like they're just a weight, a burden to carry. Not because they're bad friends, but because self-preservation is real. And constant negativity is very, very heavy to deal with. And finally, we come to habit number 11, Now, I don't know if anybody else has been watching Alliance. It's a game show on Amazon Prime and I love game shows. But anyways, if you look at certain participants in the show like Kushal Tandon, Vriddhi Pathwa, you instantly feel this annoyance, at least I feel it, because they have this habit of turning every disagreement into a personal attack. Someone disagrees with them or gives them feedback or even has a different opinion from them and their first thought is, yeh toh mere character pe umli utha raha hai. Psychologists have given this a term, when your identity gets so fused with your opinions that any pushback on any idea feels like a personal attack on you. Which is why, if somebody has a normal difference of opinion, you consider it a threat. A small piece of feedback becomes a whole thing and you end up defending or sulking or turning cold over what was really just two people seeing something differently. And when people realise that disagreeing with you means managing a whole reaction, they simply stop communicating well with you, right? And this is also happening on Alliance right now. People have stopped being straight with Kushal because they believe that he is going to twist their words. And when this happens, you end up more alone. When you are surrounded by yes-men or people who just agree with you, tell you what is easy instead of what is true, you might think it's respect but it's actually distance. They're not connecting with you. You're not really forming emotional bonds. Now the fix here is to learn how to hold counter-opinions without getting flustered. It is a genuine skill and it can be built. So the next time you feel that hot little spike of ego, that anger, pause before you react and ask yourself, is it really about me or is it just a different opinion existing in the same room as me? Learning to hold contrarian opinions is one of the best skills that you can develop as a woman, as a human being. And that is exactly what I hope you take away from this video. None of these habits had anything to do with your body, your face, your clothes or how much money you have. Every single one came down to one thing. Self-worth, the way you speak to yourself, the boundaries you set, the standards you keep and the value you place on your own time. So let me know which of these you are struggling with and you don't know how to fix all 11 in one week. Pick one, commit to replacing it, commit to constantly reminding yourself that this is something that you can change and go ahead, watch these videos next if you enjoyed this one and I'm going to see you very very soon in another one. Bye!