Peer Pressure. Another double edged sword.

Why do we make the choices that we do? Why do we do or not certain things in our life? In a perfect world there would be two very simple answers to these questions. Conscience and desire. In a perfect world our decisions would be based solely on doing some combination of what we know to be right and what we want to do. And in the absolute best of circumstances what we want and what is right would be the same.

But we don't live in that perfect world do we? There is another thing which creeps in and often takes control over our decision making process. That thing is peer pressure. And it is certainly not a simple thing. It is complex and often angst ridden and frustrating. We quite often know what we want to do and what we should do, but due to peer pressure we end up making a different choice. Why?

While thinking about this today, I came across an article someone had posted on Facebook entitled

15 Things You Don't Owe Anyone At All (Though You Think You Do)

The bottom line is really fear. How does this work? How is it that much of our decision making process is ruled by fear? Well to understand that we really need to take a look at what peer pressure is. According to dictionary.com peer pressure is social pressure by members of one's peer group to take a certain action, adopt certain values, or otherwise conform in order to be accepted.

I think a little more in depth of an explanation is needed. Generally your peers are the people whose opinions matter to you. They are all of your friends and family. Most of us decide that being cool in their eyes is important. And we will often go to great lengths, many times violating our own personal code of ethics and our personal desires in order to be accepted by our primary peer group(s).

We fear not being cool or accepted by the opinions of those that matter to us and often that alone will cause us to do terrible, mean, sometimes downright despicable things. We feel forced to act a certain way even if we are not being told exactly what to say or do. Much of the time the actions of our peers and the surrounding circumstances very strongly imply what we are "supposed" to do. 

If you are out with a group of your friends and they happen to pick on how someone is dressed or looks, some facet of their social life, their race or sexual preference, it is hard for some of us to stand up to the bullying and make them stop attacking their target. It is the right thing to do, but still not very easy. Our desire to do the right thing is overridden by our fear of not being one of the "cool kids". You can deny that it matters to you until you are blue in the face, but if you give in to peer pressure, then being accepted matters to you.

Peer pressure is what causes us to allow our families to have such a big say in our lives, even after we become adults. We want their acceptance so even though they no longer have any legally binding control over us we nod our heads and say they are right and do pretty much what they want, so that they will still love and accept us. 

Truth be told, anyone that holds their love and acceptance hostage to you agreeing with what they say or do isn't worth looking to for love or acceptance. You should be who and what you want to be independent of what others are going to say or think. 

Now having said that, is peer pressure always a bad thing? Well it is the collective thoughts and opinions of how you should and shouldn't act according to your friends and family and to a larger degree the whole world. Aside from it being wrong, to a certain degree, peer pressure is what keeps most of us from acting out in horribly violent ways when something doesn't go our way. From time to time nearly all of us have scary vile chaotic thoughts. 

We think awful things like, I wonder what that person's brains would look like oozing out of their ears if I hit them with this hammer just right. Or, if I kill this person they won't be making my life a living hell anymore. If I open the passenger door and kick this person out of my car while we are doing sixty I won't have to listen to this insufferable nagging. We don't act on those thoughts, because it is wrong and because we think about how everyone else will react to such a horrible scene.

So while peer pressure can steer us wrong, it can also keep us on the up and up. Until we reach that perfect world, where what is right and what we desire are constantly uniform, use common sense to show you when a few dashes of peer pressure are okay and when you should stand firmly against the tide for what you believe in.
 

How much control do you give away?

People say, the most important thing in the world is freedom, especially people that do not have it. But here, in the land of the free, we tend to give up most of that freedom to other people. Now I'm not talking about some of our laws being too prohibitive, because we actually do need laws to help govern ourselves. And if we did not have them, things would be absolute chaos.

No, what I am talking about is peer pressure due to public opinion. It is quite natural to want to be liked. What is not natural is allowing the fear of not being liked to make your decisions for you. But, we as a people, do it all the time.

We rush out to buy all the latest fashion trends and learn the lingo of our peer groups just so we can  be accepted. We say it's because we like those things that we assimilate them into our life. The truth is we see that other people think they are cool and we want to be cool, so we do them.

Do you realize that every single time you do that, you are allowing someone else to control what you do? You are not making a decision for yourself. You are letting others decide for you. We do this without thinking about what we want or what we would like. We just clone what other people are doing.

I have a friend who is a rather extreme example of this. It's not what you think though. He doesn't follow all the latest trends and listen to the cool hip music. Nope. He's decided that he is all about originality and being different from the masses. Anything cool and popular, he automatically chooses the polar opposite of. He will actually go out of his way to avoid doing something that he has heard is popular.

So if the cool in thing was to wear a black shirt with thin white stripes, he would wear a white shirt with thin black stripes. That's cool and awesome right? He's being his own person and not letting anyone tell him how to dress!

Being a nonconformist does not make one original. It just changes the criterion used to let other people control you. One could actually prevent my friend from doing something that he would really enjoy doing, just by making it popular.

Also, different styles and trends fit each person's inner self in different ways. IF you want to be truly free, stop letting other people tell you what is cool and what is not. Sample a variety of different ways of being and find the one that works for you. As new ideas and styles come out, test them and incorporate the ones that are really part of who you are and leave the rest by the wayside.

The odds are that a lot of your choices will still fit within a specific niche, but the ways in which you are different from the epitome of that style will show your originality and ability for free thinking. You can be cool and unique at the same time.