Are you following the herd?

A friend and I were talking not long ago. She said she was going to read the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. I asked her if she knew what type of book it was. She said, "Yeah. Mommy porn." I wondered about that for a minute, and knowing that my friend really wasn't a 'mommy porn' sort of person asked, "Well, why are you reading it, then?" She said, "To see what all the buzz is about."

Hey, people do what they do. Life is tough. I'm not judging her or anybody else. But what I am wondering about is doing something just because everybody else is doing it.

That never caught on with me. Maybe I'm missing out, but I've never read The DaVinci Code, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, or whatever. Pick a blockbuster and chances are I haven't read it or seen the movie. And I'm sure a lot of those things are good. They just never appealed to me. And I have things that appeal to me. I'm not some sort of Mr. Spock, emotionless, unreachable.

But I never do something just because somebody else (or billions of people, for that matter) are doing it. Maybe it was because of how my mother raised me. I can remember saying to her (countless times): 'Can I do this (fill in the blank)?' Mom: "No." Me: "But my friend Timmy's mom is letting him do it!" And my mother would say: "I don't care if every single person in the whole world is doing it; you're not."

Even as a kid (even though I didn't like it!) that made sense to me.

So nowadays I pick and choose what I do because I want to do it. Not because of what everybody else is doing. Let the crowd and herd mentality go its merry way. I just won't be joining it.