On Friendship and Peer Pressure
I have always been nearly immune to pressure from my friends. I’m very likely to not do something someone else suggests if I don’t like it. I will in fact go to extreme lengths with excuses to both ignore the pressure and not hurt someone’s feelings.
I will say “sorry, I’m going to be busy”, which is code for ‘I would rather be watching Netflix on my couch’. Or “II don’t have the knowledge to be helpful”, which either means ‘I don’t want to learn that skill’ or that ‘I really don’t like using that skill’.
My most common mechanism is to volunteer for a support position out of the line of fire. Like in middle school.
At the end of my eighth grade year, my friends began to get a little bit . . . boisterous. And that resulted in a set of pranks of our English and History teachers, whose classrooms were right next to each other. The other important fact we noticed was that they both taught class with a microphone so they wouldn’t lose there voices after 5 and half hours of lecture. This became pivotal to our plan.
Now this is the part where I got cold feet. I helped plan the whole thing, but on the day I knew better than to do anything suspicious. Instead I became a middle man of information. I let the people actually doing the prank know what the lookout was seeing.
I should also mention one more thing. The mics? Yeah, they were pretty basic, but they knew which speakers were theirs (basic Bluetooth).
So on the faithful day at 7:20, when the teachers stood in the hall instead of their classes, I watched as my friends opened the connecting door and switched the mics, keeping an ear open for the lookout.
And chaos ensued for about 5 minutes before the teachers had figured out what happened.
Anyways, back on topic. I have a friend who is actively trying to get me to go on a massic trip with him that I honestly have no interest for. I have used the excuse that I don’t like camping (which will be a large part of the trip). I’ve told him that the catch phrase of the trip, ‘Get Lost,’ is totally against my personality (I hate being lost; see my Jeju posts if you don’t believe me). I have offered sidelines support (helping pick the car he needs for it).
Nothing has worked. But I’m sure that this will be no different, and that in 2 summers I will not be in a shitty car with 4 people driving from London to Mongolia.
