In my opinion, most of us “follow along” to feel important. We all have that feeling of wanting to be apart of something bigger than ourselves, it’s just human nature, and some people can’t fight against that feeling. Also, no one wants to be alone, especially going through high school. Since the beginning of high school, before any of us were born, people created cliques or groups. And then there were the outsiders, or people who didn’t fit into a specific group. They thought of these “outsiders” lowly, like a stray, starving dog. Those “outsiders” didn’t want to be alone, so they tried to conform to one of those groups or “follow along”. However, there were some people who refused to “conform to society”, such as Thoreau; and that is where these tensions were created.
Some internal tensions that are created when trying to follow the crowd are, obviously, not being who you really are. At, first when you try to conform to society, you feel happy that you are finally being accepted. However, after a while, you get an urge inside of you. You start to feel that something inside of you is trying to break out. You get restless, and even short-tempered. If you ignore this feeling long enough, you forget who you really are. I forgot who I really was until, I moved up here and I finally found who I am. I also made myself a promise that I will never loose sight of who I really am again because those two years were the worst two years of my life.
Some internal tensions that are created when you don’t try to follow the crowd are loneliness and frustration. Being classified as an outsider, you don’t have many friends; therefore, you have feelings of loneliness. If you purposely chose not to follow the crowd, you can have feelings of self-doubt. In my personal opinion, not following the crowd is a great initial idea, until you really think about it. There are some issues with this idea, such as you can try too hard not to follow the crowd or even possibly try too...