Smoking & drinking due to peer pressure || Acharya Prashant, at AIIMS Nagpur (2022)

Questioner (Q): Good evening, sir. In many places, especially in college, it is seen that the person starts drinking or smoking just because of peer pressure because he has a fear that if he doesn't do this, his group will throw him out. So, what are your views regarding this concept?

Acharya Prashant (AP): What do you expect me to say? See, we do not know what to do in life, we do not know how to spend the evening, we have nothing worthy enough to dedicate our time to, so that's what we do. We try to identify with a group, and then we are forced in some way to do as the group pleases. All this is just ‘inner void’ playing itself out.

Why will you sit with random loafers and drink, and smoke, and what not if you had something worth doing in your life? Why will you do that? And why will you not do that if you have time to kill? And there are so many of us who simply have time to kill. Think of this: Time to kill. Why? Because you just do not know what to fill up your time with, because you do not know what is life. Life is time. You do not know who is the living one. You do not know the worth of each passing second, so you say, “I have time to kill,” and so you sit with someone. And frequently, it happens that when you come to college, and you start consuming animal flesh. These are the things you pick up typically in your first semester.

I don't know about the knowledge that you pick up, but these are the things that most of us generally do pick up: somebody picks up chicken; somebody takes a liking to mutton; smoking, drinking, and then we say, “Now, this is college life. This is what we, anyway, worked so hard for.” Somebody takes to chasing girls. They say, “This is the freedom that you get in college.” And at that time, it all appears so nice, so attractive, right?