Are you a “follower”?

Here is a perfect example of a word that really depends on its context to define its meaning. In 2026, this often implies you follow an influencer on some social media platform. In a religious context, this would refer to being a person who follows a certain doctrine or person.

Wait. Those sound pretty similar.

Here’s the thing: there is nothing inherently wrong with following X, but following something or someone doesn’t exempt you from the obligation to investigate, exercise discernment and act with wisdom.

And on the flip side, “unfollowing” someone is not particularly virtuous if you appeal solely to your feelings about an idea without some real reflection about why you are done with the someone/something.

I suspect you are mostly nodding in general agreement, at least those of you who are reasonably level-headed. And yet, putting this into practice proves far more difficult than it sounds. We all cheer the protagonist in a film who takes the less-travelled road and succeeds against the odds. Or perhaps we readily celebrate the hero who sacrifices themselves for a greater cause by defying convention. But on a Monday morning, after a difficult weekend, most of us lack the moral resolve to avoid passively following the crowd.

I have mentioned before that I am an introvert, which sometimes surprises people. I am reasonably competent at customer service and making people feel welcome. I can navigate social conversation without undue awkwardness, and I have learned to transform that awkwardness into genuine connection. That might sound calculated—because it is. It is my survival mechanism in a predominantly extroverted world: to perform the role of an extrovert. But maintaining this effort consistently demands considerable energy. When I am depleted from sustained social interaction, I become considerably more myself. Ironically, more myself means skepticism and analysis - this is its own sort of exhaustion.

Consider this: I read something that genuinely moves me. Invariably, once I finish, I research the book's ratings, search for other people’s opinions on the book, investigate the author's biography, examine alternative critiques of their thesis, and so on. This can be both wise and takes away some of the enjoyment of the book on its own, without all the baggage. It’s like having an inner art critic looking at everything with an acrid eye.

And for the record, though I do attempt to “follow” at times, my tendency not to willingly follow isn’t exactly a secret. One time, one of my uncles (I have 10 on one side of the family) made a comment that I had a reputation of “getting what Amanda wants” and immediately I knew this hearkened back to an incident a few months before when I adamantly did not go with the flow of things. I do sometimes get what I want, though life has a way of balancing that out with all the “lessons” it has to give.

I don’t expect anyone to live like this, like a fish out of water or songbird in a snowstorm. I’ve embraced it because one of the lovely things about getting older is you both get to understand yourself and discover you don’t know as much as you thought you did. But following anything, and I mean ANYTHING be it a religion, person, celebrity, dream, with no wisdom or self-reflection seems irresponsible to me. It’s possible that maybe we don’t always have the wisdom to really make a good decision, and yet, we live in a day and age when data is literally EVERYWHERE - we are saturated with it. Oh sure, some of it, much of it, is garbage, but that just means we have to try a little harder to find what is real and true.

And I’m not entertaining the notion of “your truth” and “my truth”. Truth is a fixed objective, even when our PERSPECTIVES differ. Let’s take a tree, for example, it looks different depending on where you are looking at it. What if I’m on a side with a big woodpecker hole, and someone else is on the other side and thinks I’m full of nonsense when I say there is a hole in the tree. Or what if I’m standing in my attic, looking down on the tree. I’d say you are both full of it and comment that it’s green and full of leaves. But it’s all the same tree. Now this is obvious because we can move around the tree and see it from all the perspectives if we have a mind to, but it doesn’t change the reality of the tree itself.

That is how truth works.

So, all I’m asking is to periodically move around the tree a bit, and ask yourself some hard questions about what you are following and why.

-A