Peer Pressure - A pressure worthy enough?
by Aadya Varma
We want to win, We want to thrive. In a world full of competition, We want to shine.
But in this pursuit of winning, We often forget thinking, That does it even make us any better, Not as a student, but as a person ?
We make friends We make them a part of our life. But when it comes to scoring in a test, We strive as hard as we can to be the best. But we forget whom we are here to detest, Our challenges or our very own second selves!
We buy a swanky gadget, Not judging it by it’s utility. But just to satiate our desire, To make our comrades admire
But let’s finally ask ourselves, For whom are we subjecting to these doings? When at the end of the day, We are just losing, The essence of friendships, the essence of our entity.
REFLECTION
"Peer Pressure - A pressure worthy enough?" is a poetry written by Aadya Varma. The poetry is posted in The Wordsmith, a digital literary journal in the platform Medium, on 2020.
In this poetry, the poet touch upon the topic of peer pressure and how it affects us, specifically how it affects our friendship. The poet also asks if letting ourselve being pressured is worth it and if we are doing this for ourselves. The poet uses a lot of poetic expressions to explain the dilemma of becoming what the society wants us to be.
The poet talks about peer pressure in a point of view of a student, we can see this in the second stanza: "... not as a student, but as a person?" and in the third stanza: "... but when it comes to scoring a test..." The poet expresses the pressure that students experience in their academic life, typically relating to how students are expected to excell academically. But it also touch on the pressure to present yourself in a certain way to impress our peers, which we can see in the fourth stanza where the poet explains how we get cool gadget just to impress our friends, regardless of its quality.
Students are vurnerable to peer pressure. This is because most students are very young and are still searching for their identity, they are easily persuaded by other people and often have a desire to seek attention. More than that, students spend a lot of their time in school and it affects most of their daily life, so if they are not able to fit in in their school, they will have a very hard time.
As we have talked about the pressure to excell academically, we might be familiar with how competitive school is. In the first stanza, the poet touches on this topic by stating how we want to win and thrive in a world full of competition. The poet then proceeded to ask if this is the right choice and if doing this makes us a better person. Competition is a staple in academic life and students are forced to go through it, society even takes pride in it. In order for students to feel accepted by the society, they have to be competitive and those who doesn't will fall behind. This doesn't only apply to students, but also life in general. After students graduate, they will have to face even bigger and more pressuring competition. Even though it's undeniable, sometimes we compete so much in life that we forget what benefit it gives to us. We do it just because other people do it, but we don't know what it makes us.
There is an interesting line in the third stanza: "But we forget whom we are here to detest, our challenges or our very own second selves!" I think this imply that over the time, the pressure gets so hard that we start to feel hatred. But perhaps we don't hate the challenge or the competition or the pressure itself, but we hate our own selves. We hate that we comply to the pressure that it turns us like this.
By the end of the poetry, the poetry asks the question: "For whom are we subjecting to this?" Are we doing this for ourselves or for other people? Do we do this because we think this is the best thing for us or because other people think that it's good? We get very used to pressures and expectations that we don't even think about those questions anymore, for us it's normal to follow pressure because that's the way of living. However, as the poet stated, we are only losing ourselves, our friendship, and the essence of our entity. So as the title suggest, eventually, it all comeback to one question: Is it worth the pressure?
REFERENCE
Varma, A. (2020, May 17). Peer Pressure — A pressure worthy enough ? Medium. Retrieved March 18, 2021, from https://medium.com/the-wordsmith-wg/peer-pressure-a-pressure-worthy-enough-8bdd255ac0fb
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