Shooting an Elephant and save yourself..."Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell"

Can you recall a time in which you were goaded into doing something that you didn’t want to do under the influence of your friends then regret?The essay is about a young English policeman stationed in Burma. He called himself   a “puppet” to the desires and will of the natives.
After receiving a call regarding a normally tame elephant’s rampage the narrator, armed with a rifle heads to the bazaar. The young English policeman then sees a village woman chasing away children who are looking at the corpse of an Indian whom the elephant has trampled and killed. He sends an orderly to bring an elephant rifle and, followed by a crowd of roughly two thousand towards the paddy field where the elephant has stopped to graze. The gun was originally for his own protection, and when he sees that the elephant is obviously quite calm he felt that he don't have to kill it. However,at this moment he becomes aware that the crowd fully expects him to kill the elephant. He realizes that he is trapped by the crowd’s expectations. If he does not kill the elephant he would seem weak by them.
         “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd-seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives”, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him.”
In the end, he ends up shooting the elephant.

It goes the same in ones life when others usually make decisions based on others view. What happened to our principle, believe and courage to make a decision you believe? This question i ask, to everybody including myself....