society and individual

Dear Reader,

If you use social media as much as I do, you will realise that you have no unique experience, and the comment section will always let you know. You will begin to notice that the things that you thought were sole or isolated experiences are not. However, this is not an objectively terrible situation. It reminds you that you exist as an individual in a wider society, you shape it and it shapes you. The anger, the frustration, the joy, occasional disgust or even irritation, is felt by many people, maybe not all at the same time for the same reason but real and valid experiences anyway.

The thing is this though, a single tree doesn’t make a forest and as much as it is advised that we are not to be hyperaware of each other at the risk of paranoia, we must consider the communities in which we exist and the society at large, even the global society, as our lives do not unfold in isolation.

This is, what a sociologist C. Wright Mills, calls sociological imagination. The call to zoom out of your own life and see where you fit in the puzzle called society. This in principle is not erasure of the self, but an attempt to help understand it better in terms of other selves besides you, viewing your life in context of others.

There is an encouragement to hyperfocus on you, your inadequacies, flaws and excellence. Sociological imagination does not ask that you abandon the image completely, but view it from a different perspective, use other lenses, to try to understand that there are many other people doing the same very thing you are- living, and we all form the larger society. We shape it and it shapes us.

We live in an era when one is encouraged to personalise yet publicise certain facets of life, and the sociological imagination interrupts that narrative.

I agree with Mills when he says that the lack of social imagination could very much lead to social apathy, which is essentially a failure to connect personal experience to shared conditions.

More often than not these days, you see on social media, videos, pictures and content in general about people’s plights war, poverty, violence and violations, and all types, manners and shapes of suffering, and more often than not we scroll away not because we are uncaring but we feel powerless to help and feel guilty for the powerlessness. The thing is this social media is a by product and means of globalisation. However, this reduces the distance but not the magnitude of the problem.

When we can’t make sense of our lives beyond ourselves, something subtle starts to happen. People retreat. Struggles become private, and suffering becomes something to manage quietly. Other people’s problems start to feel distant, unrelated, or simply exhausting to engage with.

Over time, this way of seeing narrows our sense of connection. It becomes easier to look away, to stay silent, or to assume that nothing we do will make a difference.

This is what Mills was pointing toward when he wrote about social apathy — not as a lack of care, but as a quiet outcome of feeling disconnected from the bigger picture.

Typically, when we examine culture, we think of it as a concept that is monolithic, static, isolated, not as something to be taught, learnt, shared, dynamic, circulated, diffused, as something that interacts and evolves. Culture can be viewed as a structure of interpretations and understanding, and most certainly as something that adapts and evolves.

When we begin to examine society seriously, we quickly realise that there is no single agreed-upon explanation for how it works. Sociology is not a monologue; it is a conversation — one that spans different perspectives, methods, and assumptions about human behaviour.

Some approaches emphasise order and stability. Others focus on power and inequality. Still others concentrate on the meanings we create through everyday interaction.

These differences are not contradictions so much as lenses. Each offers a way of seeing. Each highlights certain patterns while leaving others in the background.

To understand society, then, is not simply to collect facts. It is to learn how to look — how to recognise structure where we once saw only personal experience, and how to situate ourselves within patterns larger than us.

That is where sociology begins.

There are very many different schools of thought, some of which we will discuss in our following sections.

Thoughtfully,

M.