Until my first year, I was very proud of my choices and the sovereignty of my thoughts. I always took decisions and never regretted them. But it never occurred to me that it was not just me who decided, but the surroundings also heavily influenced shaping my decisiveness. It is a difficult question to answer if I could differentiate myself from the surroundings, but anyway, the realization was that I was probably just manipulated by the system to behave in a certain way.
You meet a great science teacher in your school who has an engaging personality and a passion for Science and education, and whoa! Half of your class wants to study science. Your father/ brother/cool neighbor watches football, and yeah, you seem to enjoy it too. In my childhood, all the time I would listen to my family members talk about my aunt who does Physics and how good she is as a scientist, and then I wanted to do Physics. It was probably easy to say that Physics was my love, though it was just an influence back then. There’s a whole story behind why I switched to Math- Economics, and now I think, that might be an influence too. 😛
Sometime back, I watched a video featuring Biswa, a Stand-up comedian, where he talks about how people order when they go to a restaurant in a large group. If one person orders some drink, everyone orders the same. Now, this seems an easy decision, but everyone appears to do just the same.
At times, this makes me question myself. Am I doing it because I have seen some cool person doing this? Am I influenced? OR do I genuinely like it? It’s hard to break your decision down into your thoughts and the impacts that you had. It seems one can get manipulated easily, especially kids, we should just know the right way. Time seems to be the solution.
-SylviaSolo
Jungle queen 