How Has Your Social Class Shaped Your Fate?
When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make lemonade.
- Dale Carnegie
Discovering Your Fate
The final piece of the puzzle is looking at your social class and seeing how it shapes your fate via the opportunities and options you have to choose from.
Staying in your social class helps keep society stable but may limit you and your choices. Each social class also has its own set of experiences that you partake of when you belong to it.
Fate by Social Class
Your social class may define many of the opportunities in store for you ... from the expectations of what you will do for a living to where you will live and go to school.
Tracing The Train Tracks
What are the expectations for your social class?
How much money are you supposed to make?
What are you supposed to do for a living?
What kind of education are you expected to get? Where are you expected to go to school?
Who are you expected to marry? When?
Class Expectations
What does your social class value?
What behavior does it reward? What does it discourage?
How are you expected to behave by the people outside your social class? By people within it?
Where are you expected to live?
How are you expected to live?
What are you expected to buy or own?
How are you expected to talk?
What would signal you are not part of your social class?
Are you punished or rewarded for changing your social class?
Understanding Your Answers
You may want to take some time to think about this. Often changing your social class can cause tidal waves in your life, and those of your friends and family if they are not supportive. So that naturally acts to dampen any attempts to understand how social class defines and limits you.
When you have completed all four tasks, it is time to understand the challenges you face in understanding and changing your fate. And it all begins with ...
Challenge One: Picture Your Fate
