Every day there is something unique and novel that human beings can learn from unfamiliar and even familiar things that take part in their daily life. Most people approach the world with a beginner’s mind, approaching the world with preconceptions, assumptions, and opinions, because of personal experiences acquired during their lifetime. It has become human nature to think in a habitual way, in which events, thoughts, and feelings are preoccupying the individual’s mind, which in turn is deterring a person’s ability to think and see the other perspective. It is important to break this habitual ways of thinking and eventually obtain “sociological imagination” or the ability to understand the macro-scale and micro-scale factors that are interplaying
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The two individuals taking part in this experiment are Alex and Morgan, who leave their life of comfort and paying jobs, to go to one of the poorest towns in the country to live the life as a minimum wage worker and understand the interplay of society and self. To be able to live as a functional member of society, Alex and Morgan needed to find a job to pay for food, clothes, housing and its facilities, and health care. Society gives opportunities to those with little to no education and skills to work as a minimum wage worker. However, at the same time, society constraints the minimum wage worker, because they spend several hours at work doing hard and exhausting work, such as working as a dishwasher or a construction worker. Unfortunately, at the end of the work day, after daily expenses for food, clothes, housing, and medical bills, there is no balance for the minimum wage worker. The minimum wage worker is limited in their choices of work and are forced to do the only jobs that left for them by society, which usually require extraneous work for long hours with little pay. Furthermore, the house value in society is expensive due to the rise of the economy. Consequently, minimum wage workers will not be able to afford the houses the middle-class and upper-class individuals live in and also were struggling to afford …show more content…
The minimum wage worker will have a difficult time to improve their circumstance, if they do not have the resources of the community to help them get a better education, such as attending a free community college course or learning a skill or trade, which allow the minimum wage worker to choose a job that can not only help them provide, but is something that is skillful, irreplaceable, and makes an individual genuinely happy. Moreover, to better improve their circumstances, the minimum wage worker needs to distinguish themselves with their skills and abilities. However, without an employer and a community network who is invested, it will take a long time for these workers to move up from their social positions. The sociological imagination enables an individual to understand that the homeless person on the corner of the street or the minimum wage worker walking in the cold are not able to provide themselves because of the interplay between their character and larger social forces. It is quick to judge that their circumstances are defined by their personal attributes such as laziness or minimal work ethic. Therefore, it is important to possess the sociological imagination, which helps an individual understand that an individual’s life is a reflection not only of themselves, but of the larger social forces
The two individuals taking part in this experiment are Alex and Morgan, who leave their life of comfort and paying jobs, to go to one of the poorest towns in the country to live the life as a minimum wage worker and understand the interplay of society and self. To be able to live as a functional member of society, Alex and Morgan needed to find a job to pay for food, clothes, housing and its facilities, and health care. Society gives opportunities to those with little to no education and skills to work as a minimum wage worker. However, at the same time, society constraints the minimum wage worker, because they spend several hours at work doing hard and exhausting work, such as working as a dishwasher or a construction worker. Unfortunately, at the end of the work day, after daily expenses for food, clothes, housing, and medical bills, there is no balance for the minimum wage worker. The minimum wage worker is limited in their choices of work and are forced to do the only jobs that left for them by society, which usually require extraneous work for long hours with little pay. Furthermore, the house value in society is expensive due to the rise of the economy. Consequently, minimum wage workers will not be able to afford the houses the middle-class and upper-class individuals live in and also were struggling to afford …show more content…
The minimum wage worker will have a difficult time to improve their circumstance, if they do not have the resources of the community to help them get a better education, such as attending a free community college course or learning a skill or trade, which allow the minimum wage worker to choose a job that can not only help them provide, but is something that is skillful, irreplaceable, and makes an individual genuinely happy. Moreover, to better improve their circumstances, the minimum wage worker needs to distinguish themselves with their skills and abilities. However, without an employer and a community network who is invested, it will take a long time for these workers to move up from their social positions. The sociological imagination enables an individual to understand that the homeless person on the corner of the street or the minimum wage worker walking in the cold are not able to provide themselves because of the interplay between their character and larger social forces. It is quick to judge that their circumstances are defined by their personal attributes such as laziness or minimal work ethic. Therefore, it is important to possess the sociological imagination, which helps an individual understand that an individual’s life is a reflection not only of themselves, but of the larger social forces