Essay: Group Pressure
Some of us had been young, some are young now, and some other are going to be young,
but, ¿what is special about being young? This stage of the life, is very important, because
we create at this stage our identity, and that identity is going to be in proof in a lot of
moments not just in our youth stage, but is here, in where is going to be more attacked.
Having an identity is to know how we are, how we have to act, what we have to do and not
to do, how we dress or how we talk, and a bunch of more things. We are going to center in
the pressure we receive from our “friends” and yes, I but friends into quotation marks,
because sometimes that boys and girls aren’t really our friends, because they are who put
our identity into proof. And I am going to make a question for you, how many times did
someone offer you a cigarette or a beer? how many times your group of friends had
obligate you to do something you don’t want just to be part of their valuable group?
Here starts what we know as pressure. When we are asked to do a thing, for example to
smoke, one, two, three, or four times we are receiving pressure from that persons. Maybe
they use phrases like: “you can do it”, “you are big now”, “if you don’t do it you are a
chicken”, and that words can make us feel bad. Or if we don’t do that things we can´t enter
to their group, and we want to, so if we do that things we are defeated. We have to be
strong and not fall to that pressure, even if it is hard to us to not be with our friends of all
life or with the group we had wanted to be for all life.
Three important things we have to consider in this situations are the followings:
1_ Prepare us. We have to be intelligent, we have to see the bad and not to reach it, not to
take it, because the wise person sees the bad and avoids it, so we have to be wise.
2_ Think. This is very important because we have to think at this moment what we win
with doing it, we can win things for the moment, for the year, but, what we win for life? so
we don´t have to do things if we know they are bad just to please a group of “friends”.
3_ Decide. All of us have to take decisions, we have to think a lot to take the best decisions
we can, so, once we already prepare us, we thought about the consequences of doing that
and what we win for life, we can take the best decision, in case of receiving pressure to
drink beer or smoke a cigarette, obviously we know that the wisely decision is to say no.
And I finish with this phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche: “A bad conscience is easier to cope
with than a bad reputation.”
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