"everyday Life" Film Reflection Essay

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Daily life is tantamount with the concept of habits. Repetition is what comes to mind when we think about a habit, and while it is not completely the same, it certainly is related. ‘Habit is defined through a person’s outlook or state of mind, and not just merely by the action itself.’ (Velayutham, 2017.) In the documentary of daily life, we are presented with a broad collection of everyday habits being executed by different individuals throughout the world. These include mundane activities such as waking up in the morning, travelling to work, conversing, laughing, crying, arguing, coming out of ‘the closet’, and eating, just to name a few. At the start of the film we begin to see people waking up and brushing their teeth- two very familiar activities to the everyday and ones that we would classify as an essential part of the morning. But then, it takes a certain twist and turns away from the ordinary. A young Japanese boy is awoken by his dad and commanded to go to the toilet. After his visit to the bathroom, though, they enter a small room and the viewer’s notice that the dad lights incense for the child’s departed mother. Moments such as these are very significant in highlighting the very meaning of sociology, that is, daily moments that are filled with importance and powerful meanings, even if they appear to be ordinary on the surface. This is contrasted with some of the self-absorbed submissions shown in the documentary, for example the “What’s in your pocket” segment where some individuals emphasised the significance of their material items such as IPods and Iphones. “Our everyday cultural tastes and preferences organise and symbolise relationships of social distinction which, in their turn, are connected to the social dynamics of class formation. (Bennett and Watson, 2002)

Life in a Day is a thought-stimulating film that explores discourse about the human condition all over the world. We aren’t given any exact clues that inform us of the culture of each individual or the country that they are living in. Furthermore, the film avoids complex and controversial concepts like politics and religion. Rather, it reaches the core of what it means to be human. We begin to understand that although we can be physically far from each other in terms of where we are in the world, down in our core we are astonishingly alike through our banal acts of the everyday.

References

Wright, C. (1959). The sociological Imagination. 40th ed. the United States: Oxford University Press Inc.

Velayutham, S. (2017). The meaning of Everyday life.

Bennett, T. and Watson, D. (2002). Understanding everyday life. London: The Open Univ., p.18.