Living in a McDonalized World

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the industry in this country. Even at my work we have to employ the component of McDonalization, I work at a health care facility and we use rooms that are parallel to each, that have flags next to the doors that have different meanings, blue means that doctor is inside the room attending the patient for a period of fifteen minutes or less, once the doctor comes out, the medical assistants go into the room and finish the immunizations on the patients if they need them. At the end of the day the provider I work with marks down how many patients he saw that day. He does not check the quality of service he provided, but the amount of patients he saw. Another place where I see calculability is where my parents work. They are always pressured to produce more products, their goal is to achieve a higher production number each week. It is a hard job, even though they are thought to do simple functions in the line, but they are functions that are done again and again for eight hours. This routine gets exhausting; they work like machines doing a single function for long periods of time. Both of my parents do the same thing every night during the week. I tell them to go back to Mexico and go back to their old jobs. My mom would return to her elementary teaching job and my dad would go back to working on making beautiful gardens taking his time to create different outcomes in everyplace that he works at. Making a garden made out of desert plants to a garden full of tropical plants.

As I describe part of my experience living in a McDonalized world it sounds that I’m only complaining about this new rational way of doing things, but when I talk like this is because we are becoming irrational. After reading this book I became aware that we are becoming more dependent on machines and we always look for ways to make things easier so that we don’t have to think as much, predict what we will do, eat, and drink. We are becoming dependent on food that is prepared that is based on quantity, not quality, this might affect our health in the long run, but most importantly we are dehumanizing ourselves and everything is becoming more homogeneous.

I think we don’t have to be completely against McDonalization. In other words, we don’t have to completely avoid a McDonalized way of living. Having interaction with McDonalized places is inevitable in this world, all we can try to do is find ways to look for ways to find unpredictable taste, outcomes, and new ways to escape generalization and a routinized way of living. Leave the clock behind during the weekend and cook an organic meal, socialize with people and do things the old way.