Following your friends

Okay so I know this is going to make me sound really old but I actually am an old soul.

When I was growing up …..back in the good old days of late 1990’s, early 2000’s, following your friends meant something different than what it does now. In my culture “Following your friends” is a phrase that was never used in a positive light. It meant that their influence was so great that it reduced you to someone who could not think for yourself, make your own decisions or for all intensive purposes do the right thing when they were not. Whenever disciplining their children, parents in my culture use that term if they notice unusually rebellious behaviour from their children. It may or may not have been picked up from their friend group but the blame was attributed to that anyway.

A quick google search brought me to this

Herd mentality and mob mentality, also lesser known as gang mentality, describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviours on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis.

 

A quick scan of history would show you the devastating effects of acts committed by such mobs. Hint hint…Salem Witch Trials. So its definitely understandable that parents would not want their children caught up in such groups. This brings me to today’s story which sparked this discussion.

Today I was doing one of my side jobs, Exam Monitoring and the hallways were extremely quiet. In comes a large group of students talking loudly and shouting “Bye!! BYEEEEEE!!” at the top of their lungs. I am immediately annoyed because clearly there are students writing exams. One of the girls from the group tells her friends, “Guys be quiet there are exams!”. Do you think they listened to her? Nope! One of them said, “I don’t give a f**k” and the others responded, “Yeah! why should we?”. The rest of them continued to scream Bye! to each other at the top of their lungs and then they left.

I’ve always known that my fellow students could be immature but the older I get the more it annoys me and I don’t mean to do this but….when I was their age (no I’m not even 25), I was not that inconsiderate. Maybe I was raised differently or maybe I’ve never had a rowdy group of friends that acted like that and in turn influenced by behaviour. My friend group is quite the opposite. Loud, rowdy and disrespectful was just never our thing. Sure, I’m being judgemental but how could I not be when someone does the wrong thing, gets corrected by a friend and goes back to doing the exact same thing. Moral of the story, don’t be a blind follower, know when to follow and when to step up and lead.

Also, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You know… the Golden Rule aka the Law of Reciprocity and all that jazz because I am sure when those girls have an exam they wouldn’t appreciate a rowdy bunch screaming and causing a distraction.