Peer pressure never ends for black sheep, herd members

When last I wrote about spinach in my teeth, and what it all means, philosophically, I clocked seven billion people on the planet.

This week, an online check says that we’re a billion more than that now, and counting.

This puts spinach in perspective, and nothing has changed since I thought about this, one billion people ago.

The idea that what others think of you ‘isn’t your problem’ or ‘doesn’t matter’ is a moot point.

But there’s the spinach. I once talked to an old high school friend about this. She had been a rebel pupil — pale, freckly, anti-establishment and intellectually challenging.

Loved that girl for her defiance of norms; I just couldn’t be that authentic, back then.

But she confessed that her nonconformist attitude was exactly that: conforming.

Peer pressure had forced her to wear the label ‘anti-everything’ and so, in a weird way, she was trying to fit in by trying not to.

And this was what we’d been talking about: her ‘coming out of the closet’ to admit that peer pressure has a long shelf life.

All her teenage days, she fought it by doing everything opposite; but now, like an elastic band, it’s twanged her right back into the fold, where she’s trying to be like the ‘Airbrushed Annies’ of the world, as she calls them.

It started with a fake tan — something she swore off ever doing, not in a million years, because if Nicole Kidman could carry the pasty look, so could she.

“I just got tired,” she said. “It’s just easier to fit in. “Nobody actually says anything nasty, but you kinda just realise that nobody’s inviting you to stuff.

“And they sort of look through you, the way that polished women do, when they don’t see you as a proper person worthy of their time.”

Blogger Felix Clay says that peer pressure doesn’t end when high school ends.

It just grows up, like high school pupils do, and “becomes a softer, more subtle brand of douchebaggery we call social pressure.”

The other day, a perfectly ordinary, well-balanced, successful girl I know was found weeping in a toilet (no wine involved) because it finally came home to her, despite chummy, outer appearances to the contrary, that she was never, ever going to fit in with a group of women she’d thought, for a long time, were her friends.

I took this matter to the highest court in the land — my social guru Podge — in search of explanation.

“Get over it,” she said.

“In life, you’re a herd member or black sheep.

“Neither is worse than the other, even though one thinks it’s better, which it’s not.”

As a misfit in a world of Miss Perfects, Podge reckons, you have but three labels available: saint, sinner or genius.

Stop fighting fate, she says; choose one and enjoy the ride.

In life, you’re a herd member or black sheep. Neither is worse than the other, even though one thinks it’s better, which it’s not’