Who are peers?
Peers are people who share the same age group/ societal position as you.
In the early stages of our life our neighbourhood or school friends and later as we grow up into adults our colleagues will be our peers. We often tend to be in the accepted circle of the people, within the society's accepted standards. The pressure to be equal to or better than your peers will be high. For eg: In a test, if everyone scores decent marks in your class and you fail then you will be left embarrassed, that's how people will make you feel but more importantly that's how you , yourself will make you feel. Because you want to be in the majority crowd and not among the minority who are generally considered as an embarrassment.
But who is setting these standards?
Well, here we should look at society as one giant person, who has the power to scare you as well as influence you. Society should be given one face, it's a huge individual with high expectations and biases. Society might not necessarily help you mould yourself to be better always but they give you a sense of the undying need for fitting in. You want to be a part of that giant, even if you stand out , you want to stand out for all the good reasons and not because you are lame, right? If you are a person with spectacles, lean, chubby, extremely tall, short, or have some features that make you stand out, but not in the beauty standards or intelligent measures of the society, you will never fit in. And trust me, most of us don't really fit in! When we see society in such a light, it feels like a cult!
When you don't fit in what happens?
When you don't fit in , you keep constantly trying. Genuinely trying to be the best. To be selected first to be part of something, to be liked by the people who seem cool to you, to score well and for once don't look like an idiot, but yet somehow even after trying and trying really hard, you don't fit in. And you start to think , you lack something. You will feel like you are the person who is dragging you down. And you decide that you are one odd ball / black sheep. This is not true, but yet it has so much power over you, your mind that you start to see yourself as a freak. You avoid socialising, you are not comfortable anymore , slowly your confidence level diminishes.
And because being accepted by your peers is one major thing every growing up child or teenager wishes for, they really lose faith in themselves trying. But in reality, we fail to see how natural we are by being us. We idolise the wrong people at younger ages that's the reason the saying goes, the people in our lives between the years of 18-24 are not permanent. But not from 18, we are all trying harder from a much tender age to be liked and accepted by fake people.
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