I’ve never been the kind of person that could easily succumb to peer pressure. For me, I only did things that I wanted to do, and that was it. As long as I wasn’t ready to do something, or I straight up didn’t want to, it didn’t matter that everyone else in my vicinity was doing it, I simply didn’t do it. No matter how alluring it was. But then, it can’t be all that alluring if it can’t even tempt, can it?
That’s how I’ve always been and till today, I still apply that principle. I still live my life that way. I do only what I want, not because I want to feel among, or because everyone else is doing it, I simply do it because it’s what I want to do at the moment.
This didn’t start now, I’ve always been like that. Right from my days in secondary school. I used to play football when I was in Junior Secondary school, but by the time I moved on to Senior, I just lost all appetite for the game. I didn’t watch it, I didn’t play it. And all my male friends played football and played well, many times they would even ask me to come join them, but I always refused.
I always went with them to fields, and when they played against other schools, I went with them. I cheered for them on the sidelines, but I never actually played. By the time I moved on to my higher institution, my eyes opened even more to things. This time, it was to the bad side of pressure. So many things were happening. Smoking, drinking, betting…
Today, I know countless people who are neck-deep in sports betting, I’ve seen them win really cool amounts of cash just as much as I’ve seen them lose the same amount of money. If not more. But it has never appealed to me. Smoking has never appealed to me, even when a neighbor tried to use it to get me to buddy up with him, telling me things like if he can’t smoke with me, then he can’t trust me. As if his trust is worth 1000 HBD…
And for drinking, I rarely take it. I only take alcoholic drinks on rare occasions. It has to be when I’m with my friends or loved ones, I’ll never take alcohol when I’m alone. It won’t even cross my mind. And then, I can only take it in a controlled environment; that’s either in my house or in a trusted person’s house. I won’t take it in a bar, hotel, or club. I don’t want to get drunk and find myself trending on X the next morning.
But then, does this mean that I’m immune to peer pressure? No! the good news is that I’ve gotten a good kind of peer pressure. And peer pressure is even the reason I’m here today making this post. Peer pressure is the reason I ventured into crypto, to begin with.
Before then, I was biased against crypto. I watch a lot of action movies and all these Secret Agent films. Back then, movies depicted cryptocurrencies as a bad and terrible thing. It was seen as something only terrorists and criminals used to pay for their weapons and evil services. It was like the currency of the dark web and anyone who used it would be looking at the possibility of getting sent to prison. God… how foolish I was.
When crypto went mainstream, I didn’t really put my body. I thought it was going to die down when everyone saw how dangerous it would be. Note that I never really took out time to learn about this, I just assumed that I knew it and I was adamant in my assumption. But then, people around me who were into crypto began to testify, and boy, they were showing workings. At that time, many of them were surprised that I wasn’t even in the game yet, wondering what was taking me so long.
It was about that time that my resolve began to weaken, and I started learning about it. Not long after, Hive came along and the rest is history. And now, I’m so much wiser and I know better. I know that the pressure from those around me who were making it in crypto prompted me to try it out. If not for that, I wonder what I would have been doing today.
Well, it is what it is. Peer pressure is not always a bad thing. As long as you have a sense of your own and you have the mind to say no to something you know is not good for you, then you’re good. But you see the act of simply flowing with everything and everyone because of the mentality that “everybody is doing it”? Nah… I don’t swing that way. If I’m not comfortable with it, I’m not doing it. It is what it is.
