What other ways do you spread diversity in your daily life? Please click here to share your ideas.
Diversity
Daily Life
Diversity can exist all around us in our daily lives. All interactions throughout the day, from the mundane to the exciting, contain some level of diversity. Diversity, as a concept, involves adding variety in the form of people and cultures to a setting. For some, adding variety to their routine of daily life makes it that much more interesting, while for others, it is scary and disruptive. Let’s examine areas of diversity in the typical day of a worker to see how it shapes their day:
Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.
Diversity
Daily Life
For our illustrative example a worker may wake up for work in the morning, bright and early, and while they do their morning routine and make breakfast, they listen to their favorite podcast. After they leave their house, they swing by a local coffee shop on the way to work while listening to their favorite music playlist. Once at work, they go about their regular tasks, including having the lunch they packed the night before. After work, the worker drives home, listening to the same playlist from this morning. On the way home, they stop by the grocery store to pick up some items for dinner. Once at home they make dinner while watching their favorite streaming shows. After dinner, they stream some more content before getting to bed.
Diversity
Daily Life
In this worker’s daily routine, they consumed media from three different sources: a podcast, music, and television. They encountered other individuals in four different settings: while driving, at a coffee shop, at work, and while at the store. Diversity has an opportunity to impact this worker seven times during a typical daily routine. To increase their exposure to diversity throughout the day, this worker from our example could do the following:
- Listen to a new podcast with more diverse viewpoints, rather than their favorite podcast.
- Pick a random playlist to listen to on their morning and evening commutes, or perhaps take a music recommendation from a coworker.
- Rather than binging their favorite show, this worker could see what new shows were added to their preferred streaming platform and choose to watch one of those.
- On their commute, the worker could take an alternative route through a different part of town, which could have provided examples of socioeconomic diversity.
- The worker could choose to go to a different coffee shop, in a different area of town to see a different group of employees in the morning.
- The worker’s employer could implement a more cultural diversity-focused policy.
- Rather than going to a store on the way home, this worker could have chosen to go to a different store to experience cultural diversity in store offerings or socioeconomic diversity in the types of products offered.
Diversity
Daily Life
Media consumption activities can often shape how people perceive diversity. In an article from haulixdaily.com, a conclusion was reached that a lack of musical diversity can minimize the cultural diversity and significance of music itself. This conclusion was reached when the 2020 Grammys seemed to lack the diversity of many of the top, genre charting artists, hinting at a systemic problem. In all media, by only consuming the status quo, one loses appreciation for less popular and possibly more diverse options.
Diversity can be taken for granted in daily life and often overlooked, but changes can easily be made. Many of the changes listed above would require little extra effort from the worker, but would likely increase their appreciation of diversity through their experiences.
What other ways do you spread diversity in your daily life? Please click here to share your ideas, we’d all love to learn more ways to spread diversity! Be diverse. Take care and stay connected.
