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>Yeah, I couldn't get past this sentence, sorry.

If you'd read the very next sentence ("We are only rarely aware that we do anything, or avoid doing other things, because we want to conform."), you'd have realized that the author is making exactly the opposite point you thought. The whole article is about how conformity pressure does slip in, and how we make excuses for it to convince our conscious minds that something else is actually at play.

HN is one giant non-comformance conformance party. You're more unaware than you thought.

I like to call it the Hot Topic phenomenon.

Maybe you're subject to even more conformity than you think you are, and it's in places where you haven't noticed yet.