The Sociology of…Underdogs

How to spot one. Why to become one.

The Gist of It: The power of going through life with a chip on your shoulder. How to deal yourself in, when the world counts you out.

Here’s a confession: Last year absolutely crushed me. Body, mind, and soul. Life came at me from all angles, all at once. The details are irrelevant for our immediate purposes, but suffice it to say that I’ve lived through enough not to be someone who exaggerates these things.

(Side note: Yes, that might seem like a weird/inauspicious way to kick off this Substack… BUT! I hope you’ll take it as a sign that I plan to keep it real with you and not as a sign that I’m gonna be all doom-and-gloom.)

Why am I telling you this? Because living through more stuff that pushed me to my limit is a reminder of why our inaugural Sociology of…Everything topic is so important and so universally relevant.

Underdogs: The Why and the What

Much of my work as a sociologist has focused on questions around identity: 

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we together? 

Thankfully, many aspects of identity are not fixed. Who you are today isn’t necessarily who you were yesterday or who you’ll be tomorrow. Our perpetual ability to adapt, evolve, and regenerate is a formidable superpower. Over time, some people choose to become a parent or select a life partner. Others change course and reinvent themselves professionally. Some physically transform as they improve their health or as life takes its toll. 

I also continue to reinvent myself — making life and career pivots or moving to new continents. And each time I do, I feel like a new person, despite still being “me.” I call these directed choices our “aspirational identities.” I’m grateful that we can grow to be more than the biographical circumstances of our birth and that identity is, in part, a creative act. It’s not only “Who am I?” but also “Who do I want to be?”

Defining who we are involves telling three stories: 

How did I get here? 

Who am I now? 

Where am I going? 

We’ll dive into the stories we tell about ourselves in a future month, but for now, I want to focus on one particular kind of story and identity: The underdog.