At the risk of this starting off as a repeat of something I have realized I mentioned multiple times throughout my journal assignments, I have to say that this class put a few things into perspective for me. As someone who grew up with constant financial/economic stress, I can see how my parents and I have internalized that pressure as our own personal shortcomings, without realizing that, to a degree, a much larger social force was operating in the background, steering our lives. This class did more than just teach me new material or concepts; it gave me room to reflect on them and on my own life, in ways that changed or expanded my perspective as I worked through the class materials. I learned to make the invisible architecture of society, that is, the social facts, systemic inequalities, belief systems, and power structures that are beyond individual control visible. I became more aware of how even individual self-worth can be controlled by outside societal forces. I loved that the assignments for this class went beyond essays that required me to research one specific topic and instead allowed me to connect my personal experiences to broader patterns and see how my problem(s) can often be symptoms of larger systems. Ultimately, I feel this class taught me three interconnected lessons: how inequality is intentionally built into economic and social systems, how media and educational institutions normalize inequalities as natural, and how sociology gives us the power to understand our lives differently.
Understanding that inequality is deliberately built into our economic and social systems, rather than being dependent on who works the hardest or makes the best choices, has stuck with me. Growing up, it felt like the struggles we faced financially were my family’s fault. Despite seeing how hard my parents worked, it always seemed like maybe they weren’t disciplined enough, or maybe they didn’t work as hard as my friends’ parents. Instead, this class taught me about the accumulation regime and how the top is a tiny group of people who pull resources toward themselves, leaving the rest scrambling to get by. We can look at debt as a prime example. Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom had to file for bankruptcy. This was treated as a personal failure and something to be ashamed of, rather than as part of the systemic trap it actually is. When wealth becomes concentrated at the top, it acts like a creek fed by a waterfall that becomes blocked. That blockage occurs, and the creek dries up, as the economy does. However, unlike the waterfall that can be unblocked by moving a boulder or two, the effects of an economy drying up involve loans and interest rates that I would hazard to say are often predatory, drowning people further financially. Once a crisis hits, we see austerity measures kick in and infrastructure crumble, which ultimately has the greatest impact on people like my family growing up. The more I thought about these concepts and my life growing up, the more the gears turned, and I began to understand that the harm that is built into the system is structural violence rather than just bad luck, laziness, or individual mistakes.
Unfortunately, these inequalities are not just sitting there; they are actively reinforced by the institutions that are part of our everyday lives, such as schools, the media, and even family dynamics, which teach us to see them as normal. Where I once considered schools the place we go to learn about the world and prepare us to be functioning adults within society I can now see that beyond the curriculum set by the school board we were also taught to accept a specific hierarchy, to obey authority without questioning why some things are the way they are for example why it is that some people end up on top while many more are left to scrape by. I learned that the media operates similarly, using a process called perception sanitation. This works by distracting from real issues and making poverty appear to be a personal failure rather than a system rigged to dry up the economy. The ugliest parts are sanitized, and instead, all we see is the middle-class dream. In doing this, people stay quiet and maintain the status quo, hoping to reach the middle class or higher, which, for most, is unattainable, rather than being angry and disgruntled. Growing up, I would hear things like keep your head down and work harder if you want to make something of yourself and success comes with hard work or other such statements, where my parents and other family members never realized or understood that they were passing down the same sentiment that allows the accumulation regime to continue. This class helped me realize that I internalized a lot of shame around money growing up, and it has made me uncomfortable discussing financial issues as an adult. This realization also brought clarity that these institutions didn’t just teach me about art, history, and English, but also about the inevitability of inequality. In recognizing this, I believe the power is diminished.
In the past, I have never been particularly interested in Sociology. In high school, I took a Sociology class as an elective, and I struggled to maintain my interest in it or to truly learn anything. This class reframed Sociology and taught me that it gives language to lived experiences, especially those that can feel isolating. I wouldn’t have had the words previously to adequately explain why certain feelings were so constant or why they felt so closely tied to finances, school, and my family, and now I can see the connections to a much larger pattern of socialization and class. That is not to say that my feelings were never real, but instead that they didn’t just magically appear from nowhere. For example, being raised in a household with financial instability made me hyperaware of what could go wrong, and that awareness also shaped how I not only saw but also felt about myself. What I believe made this class the most meaningful for me was that it did not just explain society in a general abstract way but also showed where I fit within it and made the concepts personal, bringing a greater understanding of how the problems many people carry privately as personal problems are actually part of a larger system of social problems.
The ability to connect my personal life to much larger public issues and coming to understand this as the sociological imagination is likely to be my favourite. Where I would previously see climate change headlines and immediately think of an environmental issue scientists and environmentalists are working to fix, I now see the connection to the accumulation regime that is drying up economies and the impact on our most vulnerable people. The new perspective I have gained from this class feels empowering. Rather than feeling stuck, I am walking away with the ability to analyze various aspects of my life in terms of predictable patterns and to think about solutions on a collective level, such as advocating for fair resource distribution and challenging debt traps. Who knows, maybe if more people begin naming these connections, they can start to be dismantled.
Going forward, I hope to make it a habit to ask what larger forces are at play in situations and to use this to help people when they are struggling, whether a friend who is stressed or in future practice. I believe that if I keep a sociological lens available to myself, I can approach life in a less judgmental way, which will make me a better advocate, friend, and psychologist. Society is more than just random people and random experiences all smashed together; it is a system that needs to be questioned, critiqued, and collectively challenged for the betterment of society as a whole