Application of Social Imagination in Modern Society: Analytical Essay

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It is unsurprisingly common for individuals to feel as if they are live a rather lagged, congested, and selfocating series of traps. There have certainly been better days, but ordinary people who believe they live such trouble-stricken lives are also often stricken with a sickening sense of not being able to overcome such feelings and the problem these feelings originate from. This shared despondency is what many see as an inevitable chapter of the human experience. This sense of hopelessly feeling trapped ultimately derives from the private orbits individuals religiously live by. It’s as if the world is in fact revolving around the individual. In this perspective, individuals see their potential, work, impact, successes, failures, and practically every aspect of their life in a magnification limited to just a close-up of their careers, relationships, religion, beliefs, and personal history. Locating one’s own fate on a timeline of one’s own life span limits one’s capacity to truly understand the underlying root cause and the truth to their problems. In reality, the human experience is frightening broad and constructed from countless, intertwined butterfly effects. When individuals gauge their fate on a timeline that covers the entirety of human history, they diverge from their self orbits and are able to see the definite relationship between themselves and society. This interconnection between self and society is referred to as sociological imagination and allows individuals to understand the social world that surpasses any common sense notion, in comparison to one’s limited personal experiences. Social imagination is the ability to see how the self plays a much bigger role and influence on society and vise versa.

In our world’s great human history, societies that practices sociological imagination have thrived and are seen with the most advanced cultures and freedoms while societies who didn’t are seen lost in aggravating periods of ongoing persecution, poverty, social injustice, and other social misfortunes. For instance, Japan is one of the transformative countries that have adopted sociological imagination and can be seen displaying such a perspective especially during the 2011 tsunami disaster. The 2011 tsunami disaster was a result of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, fourth in the world, and had nearly twenty thousand casualties (Ichikawa & Nakahara, 2013). In effort to assuage the atrocious effects the tsunami had on the nation, “a collective impulse to self-sacrifice swept” the nation in forms of monetary frugality, electricity cutbacks, and abating entertainment amongst many other efforts (Schneider, Silverman, 2013, p.11). Japanese citizens, even the ones with secure jobs, felt “a tremendous obligation to work hard, putting in hours of often unpaid overtime” (Schneider, Silverman, 2013, p.11). While people could have savaged and hoarded resources for themselves or their families, especially in such a desperate time of need, the Japanese collectively worked together under, and were bonded by, Japan’s highly valued virtues such as group harmony, conformity, relationships, family, dedication, and self sacrifice, which are all virtues that date back to the Japanese samurai age (Schneider, Silverman, 2013, p.11). The Japanese’s value of family is one that they and many other foreigners believe set Japan apart from all other nations. Family is a widely accepted social belief. It is the social belief that the Japanese people were all one big family of millions of people and therefore each individual believed that their personal choices and actions would effect and represent not just themselves or their nuclear families, but for the entire nation. The Japanese were able to understand the tremendous impact of their seemingly small efforts to rejuvenate their entire country from it’s wreckage. And in turn, small efforts such as simply turning lights off to save electricity ended up helping “Japan cope with restricted electricity supply” (Schneider, Silverman, 2013, p.11). The sociological imagination the Japanese have had allowed its people to see themselves not for themselves, but rather as a single member to a big family of millions.

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While Japan stands as one of the most transformative sociological imaginative nations, the United States stands on the other end, specifically American millennials. The term millennials is a widely accepted and used term coined by researchers and popular media to describe a group of people ranging from the birth year of the mid-1990s to the ending birth years of the early 2000s (Dimock 2019). And right now, American millennials are scientifically shown to be the most anxiety-ridden generation in recorded American history (Gander 2018). Baby boomers, ages 54-72, are seen with an increase of anxious feelings in comparison to Generation Zers, ages 38-53. But overall, millennials still came up top as the most anxious generation in America. Of course, with the complex multidimensionality of anxiety and “the intersectionality of other important variables [like] gender, acculturation, and language”, there are many factors and influences to anxiety, but there are more than a few common experiences that millennials face that can be blamed for this spike in anxiety (Leong & Kalibatseva, 2011). These experiences include electronics, exposure to new common parenting methods, loss of community connection, sleep deprivation, lower employment rates, and an all-time student debt high among many other contributing factors (Morin 2017). Technological innovation has exponentially advanced tremendously coincidently along the chunk of time that millenials came about. Electronics have prevented American millenials to develop emotional skills and social skills that allow them to physically interact well in their communities. Many thought this physical detachment from the individual from the rest of society was a problem that could be bridged with technology. But the use of technology has only given individuals more time to compare themselves to the rest of the world while trying to pick out and solve their own problems independently. American millenials lack sociological imagination despite having great access to an endless amount of information about the world they live in. The anxiety American millennials have come from wanting to have full control over their lives and future. American millennials who lack sociological imagination are ridden with anxiety because they are repeatedly reexperiencing failure in advance. Despite sources and research, millennials continue to reflect back on their own lives rather than looking at the list of common reasons science says they are anxious; or they at least think they can only find the answer to their anxiety by themselves. The detachment between individuals and society with technology is an ironic tragedy that is plaguing American young adults. By adopting sociological imagination by understanding the previously mentioned multidimensionality and intersectionality of anxiety amongst all of anxious Americans, we can hope to find a cure.

Sociological imagination is the intersection between one’s biography and human history (Mills 1961). Sociological imagination is important because it serves as a momentum for societal progression and self improvement. The efforts of sociological imagination force people to work collectively in search for the bigger reason behind some of humanity’s long-held and biggest questions. Adopting this perspective motivates individuals for a drive to make a positive change in their communities. It also allows individuals to better understand themselves while better understanding how the world works and how it affects them just as much as how they affect the world.

References

  1. 10 Reasons Teens Have So Much Anxiety Today. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/201711/10-reasons-teens-have-so-much-anxiety-today
  2. Dimock, M. (2019, January 17). Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/
  3. Gander, K. (2018, May 9). Millennials Are the Most Anxious Generation, New Research Shows. Retrieved from https://www.newsweek.com/millennials-most-anxious-generation-new-research-shows-917095
  4. Kalibatseva, Z., & Leong, F. T. L. (2011). Depression among Asian Americans: Review and Recommendations. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180820/
  5. Mills, C. W. (1961). The sociological imagination. New York: Grove Press.
  6. Nakahara, S., & Ichikawa, M. (2013). Mortality in the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3700238/
  7. Schneider, L., & Silverman, A. (2013). Global sociology: Introducing five contemporary societies. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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