Have you ever thought about how other people affect your day to day life? Our mannerisms, our expressions and more are likely learned from someone else. 

As children growing up, most of what we do or say is learned from our parents. As we get older and as technology advances, we get more mannerisms (and etc.) from our friends or the people you decide to surround yourself with or from big social media platforms like TikTok. 

An example of this in film would be the popular 2004 movie directed by Mark Waters, Mean Girls. In this movie the main character personally changes as the movie progresses. She goes from a kind and clueless 16 year old girl with her first out of homeschool experience, to joining “the plastics,” the high school group of mean girls. She falls for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of queen bee Regina George, and ends up turning into her and taking her spot of head mean girl. As a teenager without a lot of experience around people her own age in a building for around eight hours a day, she picked on the behaviors, mannerisms and style of the people she surrounded herself with.

A personal example of this would be my love for coffee. I grew up with my mom and grandma having a nice cup of coffee almost every morning. As I was growing up, I would start asking to have my own cup of coffee to sit and talk to them in the mornings, and now I love coffee and have it almost every morning. Another more resent example of this is the words and phrases that I picked up from my friends and TikTok as i spent more time with them, such as “girl”, “ty (thank you)” or “coquette.”

We can learn or pick up on so many different things from so many different people in our everyday lives, especially as we spend more time with them, so it is important to be careful about who we surround ourselves with as we grow up because they can have a lasting impact on us.