homunculus-argument:

It’s funny how schools always painted peer pressure as this shady thing where the cool kids try to aggressively persuade you into doing cool things with them, like they’d want to forcibly wrangle some reluctant nerd along with them to go do crime, have sex and do drugs under a bridge. Nah, they didn’t want your nerd ass in there, they’d actively gatekeep these activities from you.

Real peer pressure is the most breathtakingly boring people you know insisting that you should get a boring job and have a baby.

The only substance-related peer pressure I’ve gotten has been for foods and drinks I didn’t like. Particularly alcohol, of course.

And I used to think it was a variation on the same theme of the “have a baby” peer pressure.

Or at least of what those people claim their reason is.

That they LOVE this experience so much, they can’t imagine that anyone else could possibly not love it, and they cannot bear the tragedy of the very idea of anyone going through life without this experience. So they make it their duty in life to convert you, like some weird religious proselytizer trying to save your soul, out of sheer altruism.

And I still think a lot of times it is that.

But at some point I encountered someone saying that– at least sometimes– the pressure to drink alcohol is more of a trust issue.

That sometimes, a person who’s getting drunk around you wants you to be as drunk as they are, because they don’t feel comfortable knowing that you’ll be sober unless they 100% trust you. Because being sober around a drunk person puts you in “a position of power” over them.

And– after I somewhat recovered from the strain of trying to wrap my mind around the worldview of someone who would feel safer getting drunk among drunk strangers than sober strangers–

–well, then, I started wondering if this might actually somehow relate to the babymaking peer pressure, too.

like, maybe some of the “trust me, your life won’t have meaning until you’re a parent!” that I’ve gotten from barely-acquaintances who should have absolutely no stake in whether or not I have a baby…

…might actually be about how they feel, when navigating all the hardships of raising a kid– while having to coexist, at work or around the neighborhood, with other people who are NOT going through all of that, and yet seem to be totally happy about it.

Maybe it threatens them somehow.

I dunno.