Peers, Responsibility, Pressure

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Someone you are of the same age, class or the same social group with can be defined as your peer. We all in one way or the other have peers. Belonging to a social group comes with its own responsibilities and other stuff. With that comes positive influences and negative influences. These sort of influences your peers can have on you is what we can define as peer pressure. The kind of influence however your peers have over you is what determines if the pressure is positive or negative.

Peer pressure is feeling a responsibility to do similar things as your peers for whatever reason that it. Some people succumb to peer pressure so their peers accept or respect them while some people do it because they have been convinced it is good or fun. Peers that have positive influence on one another is undoubtedly what most of us look for. However, you do not always get what you want and it becomes your responsibility to change that narrative when something of the sort happens.

I have succumbed to peer pressure and though I like to believe I am not easily influenced by what my peers say, I have fallen prey to negative peer pressure. I like to believe that in my little way, I have been a positive influence on my peers as some have been to me.

The clearest negative peer pressure I will recall is falling victim to crypto scams or Ponzi schemes. About two years ago, I joined my first Ponzi and experienced my first crypto scam. The funny thing is that when this so-called trading crypto platform was introduced to me, my friends and I knew from the beginning it was scam. At the time, we had been in the crypto space for about a year and so we could tell what an obvious crypto scam was.

I told my friends I wasn’t going to take part in this because it was clearly a scam and for the longest time I held my ground. But things went South when I heard most of my peers joined and had already started earning. It wasn’t a lie. It was very true because in no time, their initial investments of $50 became $100 and kept increasing. So, I said to myself I would join too but with just $50 because I didn’t want to lose too much. We had a strict policy where you were supposed to follow a trading plan given to you based on your investment but my greedy friends and I decided to use trading plans that were made for people with $300 investments. At the start, we had no problem and was making more. Some even made sure to test the withdrawals and it worked fine.

The first thing that should have probably made me stop was when I lost more than half of my first investment. Instead, I decided more USDT into this site and kept making more which didn’t seem enough. Long story short, the trading platform was all a scam and we all lost our money which at that point we had all made deposits of more than $100 each.

An example of positive peer influence is when my friends encouraged me to take an interest in crypto. I always saw crypto as a scam because I didn’t know anything about it till, I got to the university. It was there I met good friends who educated me on what crypto actually was which prompted me to do more research of my own. Fortunately, my first crypto investment yielded big profits for me. It was in 2021 when BTC reached its ATH then at about $67K.

My friends and I have also positively influenced ourselves to study more when we were still in school which benefited us. We also encouraged ourselves to take our religion more seriously by learning our deen.

And of course, “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy” has been a code we have tried to live by since maybe level 200 or level 300. We made sure that as much as we learned, we had some sort of fun by taking part in school activities.

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So, what are some of your thoughts on peer pressure? Do you any examples to talk about? Let’s hear it. You can do so by participating in the April Inleo calender.

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This is my response to day 11 of the April InLeo monthly calendar. I encourage you to join.

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Thank you.