Ranting & Raving

The world is so full of contradictions. Though I do believe that we can create our own realities, we are also so susceptible to the realities of others. I'll give you an example. I study psychology and sociology. Many of my friends are engineers and give me a hard time about my choice of majors. They say that my classes are all BS and that they're easy. And lately, I've noticed that I agree with them and I joke along with them. I've come to value my degree less because of the influence of others. How did I let that happen? It's pretty disconcerting. I shrugged off their comments and didn't defend myself for so long that their message started to eat away at my belief. Now, in some ways I truly view my degree as inferior. I have let their notion that "social sciences" and "making less money upon graduation" means my degree is worth less. I've started to believe that because I spend less time on homework, my degree is easier.

But do they ever have to think for themselves? Aren't they being taught to think, whereas I'm being taught about how we think and being taught to challenge everything I learn in my classes? I'm intellectually challenged every day. I look at how the human brain works, at how we as humans interact with one another, and at the fact that the majority of our "reality" has been constructed by us so how do we know whether or not its real? Now I'm getting on my high horse of why my studies are more important, which isn't true, either. They are different. Without engineers, we wouldn't have the same technological advances, modern medicine, infrastructure. Some really important things. Why, then, is it also so hard to value looking at the way our brain works or how humans interact? Why do we as humans have such a hard time accepting multiple truths at once? Why do things have to be better or worse rather than also? (See thoughts above: I am just as guilty of it as the next person.)

Every day, we try to simplify the world around us in order to comprehend it. We whittle it down into numbers or words or other terms which we think we can understand. We put judgments on things to determine what is more important. But do we really understand and do we have any idea where those value judgments should be placed? We created those words to describe that phenomena, meaning our description and potentially our understanding is limited to the words we have to describe it. We oversimplify. We put things in groups, because if everything had its own box that would be difficult to interpret and understand. That's why we have stereotypes, but stereotypes aren't always accurate. 

So are we not using our brains to their fullest capacity to understand the world around us or are we incapable? I'd argue that the world is too vast and complicated for us as humans to fully understand at this point in time. We can only know parts of it. Yet it is a valiant effort to seek to know more in any field, be it in engineering or the social sciences.

 Why don't others see these fields as equally important? 

1. Because in our capitalistic society, we value money.

2. Engineers make more money than social scientists.

3. Therefore, engineering is more important (and better) than social sciences.

Again, with the oversimplification. However, there are many people in this nation and this world that view it this way. Whether they realize why they view the "soft" sciences as inferior or they are completely oblivious, it is a socially accepted view. And in a world with more information than any one person can possibly comprehend, isn't it enough to simply buy into what society says rather than challenging these beliefs and coming up with a more complicated view?