In 1991, a puzzle-platformer video game called Lemmings was released, and I absolutely loved it. The goal was to guide a troop of adorable, green-haired, blue-robed lemmings from an entrance to an exit, navigating a landscape filled with treacherous obstacles. You couldn’t control the lemmings directly; they just marched forward in a single-file line, blissfully unaware of the deadly drops, traps, and rivers ahead. If you didn’t assign them specific tasks—like building, digging, or blocking—they would walk off cliffs to their doom without a second thought. They just followed the one in front.

At the time, I didn’t really know the origin of the term “lemming.” It turns out, it comes from a pervasive myth about the small arctic rodents. Popularized by a 1958 Disney documentary, the story goes that lemmings periodically engage in mass migrations that end in them blindly marching off cliffs into the sea. The reality is that this is a misconception; their population cycles can lead to migrations where some may accidentally fall or drown, but there is no instinct for mass, unthinking suicide. Yet, the myth persists as a powerful metaphor for a behavior we see every day: the human tendency to mindlessly follow the crowd.

Our lives are a constant battle against a gravitational pull toward conformity. We are, in many ways, hard-wired to follow the pack, and taking the road less traveled is far harder than we think. But that untrodden path is where new experiences, true self-discovery, and profound opportunities are found.

The Early Days of Following

As a child, this pull starts as simple peer pressure. I have a vivid memory from my youth that still makes me cringe and laugh. A group of us were out, and for some reason, the collective “wisdom” of the group decided it would be hilarious to tip over a port-a-potty. The only problem was that one of our friends was still inside. Fueled by the inexplicable logic of group dynamics, I helped do the deed. The look on his face when he emerged—dazed, confused, and a little bit blue—was a sight to behold. Thankfully, the unit had just been cleaned. We’re still friends today, but that incident was an early, messy lesson in how easily we can be swayed to do things we know are wrong, just because everyone else is doing it.

This pressure cooker of conformity has been supercharged by the proliferation of social media. Today, the playground taunts and hallway whispers have been replaced by a global, 24/7 subconscious web of influence. Every ‘like,’ comment, and share serves as a micro-dose of social validation, a little endorphin hit that reinforces our desire to align with the digital crowd. We subtly tailor our posts, our opinions, and even our life experiences to what we believe will perform well, often without even realizing we’re doing it. The pack is no longer just in our physical vicinity; it’s in our pocket, constantly judging and guiding.

The pressure to conform only intensifies as we get older. In young adulthood, the goalpost shifts to what society deems successful, which usually means making money and pursuing a prestigious career. As the son of two Filipino doctors, there was tremendous pressure on me to follow in their footsteps. It’s very much a part of the culture. I spent my freshman year of college as a pre-med major, not because it was my passion, but because it was the expected path. It was the safe, respectable, and well-trodden road that everyone in my orbit seemed to want for me.

The Desires We Inherit

This phenomenon goes deeper than just our actions; it infects our very desires. We think we want things for our own reasons, but often, we just want them because other people want them. Remember the Beanie Babies craze of the 1990s? These little stuffed animals, which cost a few dollars to make, suddenly became must-have collectibles. People weren’t buying them because of their intrinsic value or beauty; they were buying them because everyone else was buying them, creating a speculative bubble fueled by collective desire. We were convinced they were a sound investment, but we were really just caught in a feedback loop of wanting.

The French historian and philosopher René Girard built his life’s work on this core insight, which he called Mimetic Desire. His theory posits that our desires are not original; we imitate or borrow them from others. We see a “model”—a friend, a celebrity, a societal figure—desire something, and that act of desiring makes the object desirable to us. This single concept was the starting point for his broader theory on human culture: this shared desire inevitably leads to rivalry and conflict, which societies then resolve by unconsciously uniting against a single “scapegoat” to restore order. It all starts with learning what to want from the crowd. This begs the question: “What are actually our own desires?”

This is where the statement, “Care less what other people think,” becomes so incredibly powerful. It’s not about being rebellious for its own sake; it’s about giving yourself the freedom to disentangle your own motivations from the mimetic noise around you. It’s a declaration of independence for your own mind. And it’s funny, because even as society pushes us to conform, it has always held a special admiration for the rebel—the one who doesn’t do what everyone else is doing. It’s as if we have a subconscious recognition of just how hard it is to break away. Think of the enduring icons in pop culture: James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Han Solo in Star Wars, or Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. They are celebrated not for fitting in, but for forging their own path, often in defiance of overwhelming pressure. We applaud their independence because, on some level, we wish we had more of it ourselves.

And what’s fascinating is that what we think other people think is often completely wrong. In his book Collective Illusions, Todd Rose (whom I was lucky enough to meet—a brilliant thinker from here in Utah) brilliantly unpacks this. His research shows there’s a huge gap between our private beliefs and our public actions. We assume the loudest and most repeated opinions represent the majority view, and then conform to that illusion. A powerful example from his research is the definition of a “successful life.” Privately, the vast majority of people define success in terms of personal fulfillment. But when asked what they think most other people value, they say fame, status, and wealth. This is a collective illusion in action: we end up chasing a version of success that we don’t personally value, all because we wrongly believe it’s what everyone else wants. We enforce a norm that almost no one truly believes in.

The Dangers of the Pack and the Power of “Why”

This instinct to follow can have devastating consequences. The most famous and tragic example is the 1978 Jonestown massacre, where over 900 people died after following the orders of cult leader Jim Jones, leading to the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.” It’s a horrifying testament to how the pack mentality can strip away individual judgment.

On a less extreme but far more common level, we see this play out in corporate cultures. A company’s culture can be a powerful weapon, aligning everyone toward a common mission and accelerating progress. But it can also be a boat anchor, preventing meaningful change. Cultures are self-reinforcing; employees follow established norms like lemmings. When you try to introduce a new idea or change a process, the existing culture often protects itself, pushing back against the very change it may need to survive.

The antidote to this is simple, yet profound: ask why. Questioning the path, especially when the entire pack is moving in one direction, is a superpower. Steve Jobs built his entire philosophy around this, famously saying, “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” He understood that innovation doesn’t come from accepting the status quo, but from challenging it at every turn.

Formulating our own path is hard because we are constantly being manipulated by biases and external forces:

• Repetition Bias: We believe things are true simply because we hear them over and over.
• Survivorship Bias: We focus on the “winners” who took a certain path, ignoring the many who took the same path and failed.
• Social Media & News: Our information streams are heavily skewed. For instance, research shows that on Twitter, roughly 10% of users produce 80% of the tweets, creating a distorted view of public opinion. This is amplified by the Friendship Paradox, the phenomenon where your friends, on average, have more friends than you do, making certain ideas and behaviors seem more popular than they actually are.

Finding Your Own Path

What do people on their deathbeds say they value most? Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who spent years working in palliative care, documented the most common regrets of the dying. The number one regret, by far, was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” When all is said and done, people don’t wish they had made more money or accumulated more status symbols. They wish they had been authentic.

It’s crucial to recognize the powerful, invisible gravity that pulls us to do what everyone else does and want what everyone else wants. It’s a force of nature, but it can be resisted. The first step is awareness. The next is having the courage to ask “why” and to listen to the answer that comes from within, not from the crowd.

Find your own path. Want what you want. Be your own person. You’ll die a much happier one.