Reality and Life World
Have you ever noticed how the environment and behavior interplay with exclusive and mutual manifestations?
You are driving on a long, winding road with dense fog. There’s no sunlight and the only sign of the sun’s existence is that orb hanging over the clouds. You somehow forget that it’s different from what you left behind.
You have drawn up the car’s window. Your car’s heater might be on and you are consumed by the discomfort from congestion and insufficient oxygen. The situation would be worse for a claustrophobic person.
Nonetheless, you suddenly look into your house’s security camera and see the melting sun emitting feeble rays through the room’s window. You are surprised to see and check the time; it’s only a quarter past 4 and the feeble-yet-present sunlight is suggesting warmth. Your overall perception of that scene is somehow gratifying and pleasant. While here you assume the earth’s onboarded its second, relatively darker, journey of the day.
That’s the reality for you, the dense fog, traffic that behaves differently, that heated car. It’s overall discomforting, and you want this journey to end up soo. This perception of your reality will influence your behavior as well, combined with several other social conditions of that city/place. As you are in a rush, you would want the traffic to give you the way and might overspeed whenever you find the chance to. Your interactions with others would be defined by your perception and how you feel about your reality.
And back home, the reality is different. The environmental conditions there would lead the behavior of the residents of that area. This is the concept of life-world, only less layered and nuanced. Although many sociologists argue that it’s subjective construction of reality.
Is it really wholly constructed??
What you find in the shape of the environment is natural, it’s your perception that’s constructed. So, maybe it’s the amalgam of both that forms the lifeworld. It differs.
Given how you perceive the situation, respond, behave, and presume, based on the multi-layered environment, material and immaterial, is this interesting concept, life-world, a loosely translated word of a German term. It gives 2 pondering notes.
First, how consumed you get in your surroundings, and second, how differently you behave in varying environments, i.e., your environment has a strong influence over your behavior and abstractly vice versa.
That’s where the premise: it’s all relative or/and reality is subjective comes in.
