It was a hot late-April afternoon in Bhopal, hotter than most past years (Thank you very much, climate change). I was sitting in our sweltering school bus, getting close to my house.
It was one of those session-reopening days when you confirm your selection for elective subjects and go back home to the start of a beautiful summer vacation, which we were in desperate need of.
"Why did you choose Computer Science?! Don't you know how hard of a subject that is?!" A classmate of mine asked me.
"I find it a pretty interesting subject; don't think it will be hard for me." I replied.
"We'll see that when you fail the exam. Everyone's taking PE (Physical Education), bro; you'll get to play while others study, and the teachers are very lenient." Replied the classmate (Extremely rude, obviously).
The perception of certain subjects being harder than others was never clear to me. I have always enjoyed math for its beauty, being the ultimate truth. And similarly for Computer Science, what this classmate didn't know was that I had been programming and working with computers since I was a kid. So the curriculum was already half-done for me before I even picked the subject as an elective.
Even if it wasn't, the generalization that Physical Education is easier than, say, Computer Science is incorrect. It might be easy for certain people, but it was definitely not for me. The fact that I had to perform activities with a bunch of kids I didn't like, study about nutrition, game scheduling, and whatnot was the literal definition of hell for me!
As a result of almost everyone in my school choosing PE over Computer Science due to the subject of PE being "supposedly" easier, my school was contemplating at one point whether it should even offer the CS subject; fortunately for me, a couple of other students enrolled, and the subject was kept with minimal resource funding (they got their middle school teacher to teach us, well, all the best to us because we knew we were going to study ourselves as that teacher had no clue).
Long story short. I didn't feel the pressure of choosing a subject just because everyone else was doing so. How was I able to go against literally everyone's judgment and bias of ease? Simple, I did not experience "peer pressure".
While, by definition, Peer Pressure sounds like a bad thing, it keeps the fabric of society running and stops people from devolving into unnecessary rebels. As much as people might like to hate peer pressure, the saying "Wisdom of the crowd" exists for a reason. If many people are choosing something, there must be some validation there. Entire economies have been built around the fact that something is "chosen" by many people.
The drawbacks of Peer Pressure are still pretty serious:
- Makes you act against what you truly want to do by impacting what you perceive as important and unimportant.
- Subconsciously affects your judgement on the difficulty of actions. Things easy for you might become hard just because you perceive everyone else struggling with them. Similarly, there might be unnecessary pressure on you to accomplish things that are hard for you but might be easy for others.
- Constantly puts you in a state of needing validation from peers and the need to follow others rather than carving your own way. And the terrifying part is that peer pressure tends to kick in at some of the most important junctures of your life, like:
- Choosing a school/college major (or which colleges you even apply for)
- Choosing when to get married or when to achieve major society-standard life goals
- Choosing which line of work to get into
My classmate was experiencing a version of "Peer pressure," which blinded his ability to reason for himself that he might have been good at Computer Science if his mind wasn't made by everyone else also saying that PE was easier.
They don't say, "You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with," for no reason.
Why was I not affected by peer pressure?
I have lived in over a dozen places since I was a kid; my father's job required us to keep shifting every one and a half years or so.
I realized early that this was both a curse and a blessing I had to count on. The number of people I am in touch with today and have as friends is minuscule due to life's natural flow. Still, at the same time, I have been able to tell myself, "I will make the decision I feel is right instead of going after what everyone else wants because I won't know any of these people in a couple of years anyway."
This did get harder during my teenage years when the natural inclination to be part of a bigger group kicked in. Still, life-altering decisions that dictated what I would be doing for the next few years were made by me and not anyone else.
What can we do?
As outlined above, peer pressure is a good thing sometimes. Someone who might not know what to do can use the influence to shape their decisions to the wisdom of a crowd.
Not everyone has the blessing of changing cities every year, and it's all about tradeoffs. You might have a larger group of people to call friends because of following in everyone else's footsteps, but that comes at the tradeoff of eroding your identity one influenced decision at a time.
It still depends on the individual which aspect is important; as much as social media or woke publications might tell people, a positive social fabric built on top of common decisions is still important. Our entire society is built on top of common thoughts about what is good or bad.
If you want to live your life with people close to you and be like them, there is nothing bad in wanting that.
If you want growth regardless of what other people, even the ones close to you think, and you're okay with them being distanced over time, You need to strike a fine balance. Too much compromise on either side of the equation is bad.
That being said, if you are not comfortable with something and are only doing it because everyone else is doing it, it might be a good idea to reassess and drop that activity if it isn't worth it long term.