Other People's Choices Are Not Evidence for Your Life

Just because others get jobs doesn't mean I must get a job, and just because others start companies doesn't mean I must start one. Social psychology has repeatedly confirmed that the behavior and norms of the majority really do change individual judgment — but that is not evidence that the majority is right; it is evidence that humans are influenced by others' choices out of accuracy-seeking, belonging, and self-image. So apart from common variables that affect everyone, like the economy or industry conditions, the fact that someone else chose a certain occupation and the question of what occupation I should choose are, from a decision-making standpoint, best treated as nearly separate events. People differ in assets, income, skills, family obligations, how long they can withstand failure, and risk preference — so the cost and expected return of the very same action differ from person to person.

Suppose I'm in what I'll loosely call, for convenience, a “life with limited options” — a state defined not by character but by having almost no deployable capital or stable cash flow and little cushion to survive failure. Then securing cash flow first, through employment or other means, is likely more rational than founding a company. Classic empirical work shows that initial capital and liquidity constraints can genuinely limit entry into entrepreneurship, and later studies show the relationship between wealth and founding isn't simply proportional across all asset levels — so the point is not “the rich should found and the poor should get hired,” but that you must calculate the size of risk you can actually bear. There is also research showing that economic scarcity itself can erode cognitive bandwidth, so a choice that may mean years of uncertain income is simply not the same problem for a person whose survival costs are urgent as for a person with ample living funds. Conversely, for someone who already has skills, a high probability of winning customers, capital and living expenses covered, and the ability to start again after failure, giving up their highest-expected-value opportunity to secure a stable paycheck may be the greater opportunity cost. The same act called “getting a job” carries entirely different economic meaning depending on the person.

The problem arises when society ignores these differing conditions and turns a single path into the norm. Research distinguishes “tight cultures” — strong norms and low tolerance for deviance — where the range of permitted behavior narrows and the pressure to conform intensifies. When I say “slave society,” I don't mean people are legally property; it's my blunt shorthand for exactly this state, in which individuals put society's standard route ahead of their own conditions. Social norms are not mere atmosphere — they change actual behavior through internalization and formal and informal sanctions, and recent norm research also notes how they can collide with personal autonomy. So the stronger the logic of “everyone goes to college, so college,” “everyone gets a job, so a job,” “everyone's founding startups now, so a startup,” “my friends are marrying, so marriage,” the more a person substitutes the group's choices for their own objective function — and that pressure toward the majority genuinely shifting judgment and behavior is consistent with the vast literature on conformity.

So other people's actions should be read as data, not as answers. If someone took a job, the question is not “should I take a job too?” but what their assets, abilities, risks, and goals were, and what the labor market was like, such that the expected value of that choice was high. If someone founded a company and succeeded, you don't copy the behavior — you examine under what resources and constraints that judgment was rational. Entrepreneurship research itself shows conflicting empirical results on wealth and liquidity constraints, which is precisely a good example of why no single success formula generalizes. In the end, another person's choice can be information but never the basis of my choice; the basis of my choice must always be my resources, my abilities, my risks, my opportunity costs, and the outcome I want. Setting economics and psychology side by side, human behavior emerges from the combination of individual conditions and social pressure — so analyzing the conditions that produced an action is far sounder than copying the action detached from its conditions.

Freedom is not doing something different from others. It is closer to the capacity to calculate your own conditions and decide, independently of whatever others are doing. Given the research showing how strongly social norms move human behavior and how they can clash with autonomy, keeping other people's choices as reference material only — and returning the final judgment to your own conditions — is at least the way to preserve the independence of your decisions.