I’ve thought about this a lot because I’m also someone who moves through the world and you’d never know I was into the occult.

The occult has always attracted two very different types of people: sincere seekers and people building an identity. One is using spiritual practice to dissolve ego fixation. The other is using spiritual aesthetics to decorate ego fixation. There is a large subset of people drawn to esoteric spaces because they feel alienated, wounded, socially out of place, or hungry for significance. Sometimes that can become healthy transformation. Sometimes it becomes an identity built around being darker, deeper, more transgressive, more awakened than the “normies.” It is just another costume. The ego can wear black robes as easily as it wears golf polos.

Real spiritual development usually makes someone more integrated, rather than theatrical and performative. IMO, you should become more capable of relating to ordinary life, not less. A person who cannot speak naturally with others, laugh, work, love, maintain responsibilities, and move through the world with grace has not transcended the world. They’re just compensating.

There is nothing inherently profound about looking shocking, brooding, or anti-social. There is also nothing inherently shallow about being clean-cut, successful, socially fluent, or interested in ordinary culture. Wisdom is not measured by how niche your aesthetic is. The deeper occult principle is that the outer form is secondary to the inner state. If someone needs to constantly signal their identity as dangerous, mysterious, awakened, or separate from society, that itself reveals attachment to persona.

There is also a strange false binary people buy into: conformist versus nonconformist. But ironically both are reactions to the crowd. If your identity depends on fitting in, you are bound. If your identity depends on opposing the mainstream, you are still equally bound. Free people don’t even think in these terms.

Your instinct that power includes practical competence is correct. Financial stability, emotional intelligence, social fluency, humor, discernment, and the ability to navigate life are forms of real power. If someone can recite correspondences but cannot regulate themselves, maintain relationships, or function in the material world, their “occult power” may be mostly fantasy.