To Conform or Not to Conform

Echo Poem based on Hamlet's To Be or Not to Be

To conform or not to conform? That is the question

Is it better to follow what society says,

Become another person that just mindlessly follows the crowd

Achieving goals just like anyone else would,

Or should I be different and create my own path?

To be the one who proves everyone wrong.

To go through the struggles of carving a path I made for myself.

To conform, to follow - that’s all conformity is -

It is the decision one makes to not be different

To be like everyone else, to follow the path that was carved for me before I was even born.

To conform, to follow. To follow one’s given path to success

That is what everyone wants in life, that’s what I want in life

To be  financially stable, to have gotten a degree, to have a house, a family

Those are some goals I see accomplishing by conforming

By giving up some dreams to fulfill others,

I see myself having a wonderfully set life in the future.

By conforming, being like everyone else, that doesn’t seem so bad

Because who wants to have to struggle through life,

Through the difficult decisions you don’t have the answers for,

To end up back in square one at the bottom not the top.

When a plan, a path is easily given to me which guides and helps me along the way.

A path that has a solid end goal, one that is not unknown.

But conforming, following, when one does so, loses their happiness,

Their voice, their way of determining what their dream really was

Yes I dream of a degree, a house, a family

But I also dream of freedom, of traveling, of seeing the world

Of finding the real  me in this world of conformity

They say that by conforming to society I create MY own path,

But is that the truth. Or do I just mindlessly accept and  follow one that was pre-made for me.

Do  we just conform because we don’t know the future.

The future which could be so cruel, where we believe we succeed but is actually a lie.

But by conforming, following, I lose my chance to prove to the world I didn’t need a plan

I didn’t rely on a plan that was carved for me, that was forced on me to follow

To be like the others, the norm. Why can’t I be me?

The me I made myself, from start to finish?

But fear, fear is what stops me.

The fear of failing, of disappointing, of not succeeding when I could have.

Of not achieving what could have been achieved.

Of not being able to live the life that could have been for me.

Maybe that’s why, why I/we easily choose conformity, following mindlessly

Even when we didn’t want to.

Because I/we realize that failing is harder than conforming.