If peer pressure makes us do materialistic things what to do?

Transcript

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peer pressure or pressure to say how do we avoid that.
The stimulation will come in from there. One big advantage of post-modern culture which is what we said mostly in workplace also is that that if we don’t interfere with other people, people don’t interfere with us. Then pressure is a little bit but ultimately in the workplace people are concerned about their performance.
They are doing their job well. There are certain social occasions which we may have to navigate. There is an increasing we could say almost respect or acknowledgement of diversity of lifestyle.
So if I want to live in a particular way that is my choice. We should not impose it. And that is being more and more acknowledged everywhere.
So there are people of different sexual orientations and they publicly acknowledge that and people appreciate that because people are coming out. And so the idea of diversity is very much accepted. So vegetarianism for example.
Now in India still people think to become modern means to become technologically good. In the West actually it’s cool to become a vegan. To be a non-vegetarian, that’s old fashioned.
That’s what we were in the past. Now we have become more conscious. Don’t call on half the animals.
So to some extent there will be some peer pressure but if we stay firm then people leave us alone. Where it becomes a problem is if we try to impose our beliefs on them. Why are you doing this? If they feel that we are a threat to them then they also become threats to us.
But we just do our thing well and leave it. Sometimes you may feel that because of this I am not belonging to a particular social circle. But because there is so much diversity of practices in the workplace which is also encouraged.
So people doing their own thing is not a major cause of exclusion. The whole workplace atmosphere… The whole atmosphere includes humans. So that can work to our advantage.
Often the peer pressure is actually more in the mind than in actual reality. So we think if I don’t do this, I will be excluded. I will be excluded.
But I remember there was one student he had become a devotee while he was in engineering college. Then he went to another place to do his PhD. And he was sharing a room with another person in front of him.
So he woke up early and under his blanket he was chanting. And then one day he noticed that his other person also had changed. And then he found out that other person who was also a devotee was chanting secretly.
So we don’t have to presume that people are going to be opposed. People sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. They feel uncomfortable with the unfamiliar.
But they feel that overall we perform well, we are well behaved. Then they don’t bother us so much. And even rather than thinking of the workplace as filled with people who are non-devotees.
Non-devotees also, there are people who may be relatively a little bit more in the mood of goodness or a little bit more in the mood of passion. And we don’t have to stereotype goodness, passion, ignorance simply in terms of regularity. Regularity is one aspect of it.
Sometimes some people may be eating meat or drinking as a part of their culture. That’s how they were born and brought up. But in other aspects of their life, they may be cultured, well behaved, gentle, courteous.
So they may have some aspects of goodness also in them. So rather than simply you are doing this, this person is doing this, therefore this person must be like this. No.
That particular behavior may be in the mood of ignorance. But that doesn’t mean the whole person is in the mood of ignorance. It’s very easy to label people.
Perhaps one of the biggest irony of the last century was that the one person who was responsible for killing maximum number of human beings was Hitler. Hitler was a vegetarian. Does that mean he was better than all the people who ate meat? No.
He was a vegetarian for whatever he ate. But he was also a mass murderer. He was responsible for killing so many people.
So we don’t have to stereotype people based on one particular action of theirs. If you see that even among our patriciars, some will be relatively more in the mood of goodness. Some will be relatively much more in the mood of ignorance.
So we keep a distance from those in the mood of ignorance and we associate with those who are relatively in the mood of goodness. That’s when we can move on.