I overheard someone talking in the coffee shop yesterday: talking about going ‘back to the office’. She said she would continue to work from home, because 90% of people in her team had voted to do so, and she felt bound by their individual decisions, even though the office was open.
Secretly she wished it were otherwise.
We are all bound by the crowd: it’s a mechanism of our social cohesion to subsume the ‘self’ to the ‘other’.
We can all be individual, and yet there are limits to individuality if we wish to remain within the arms of a community.
Community always requires consensus, at least to some degree: there are always behaviours that will get you excluded.
The trick is to know when being within the crowd, belonging, is the right thing to do, as opposed to simply the easy one.
Use your sixty seconds today to consider which crowds you belong to: can you think of a time when your individual opinion has varied from a group, and yet you ‘went along’ with what people thought? Maybe as simple as choosing which restaurant to visit, or which candidate to employ, or something bigger.
It’s good to conform, to agree, to belong, but there are times when it’s also important to step beyond the crowd.
