Why is everyone in a rat race?
Rat race is often a misunderstood term. Everyone thinks it’s about people who do a job and follow the most beaten path. But stealing from Wikipedia, is just an ‘endless pursuit’, mostly pointless, to trick us into thinking we are living a life of our own.
And hence I believe- everyone is in a rat race. Even the most innovative daring people who do new stuff all day long, are in a rat race.
Of course, the stereotypical rat racer is the person who never achieves anything meaningful and just keeps on repeating a set number of things that keeps them barely alive.
They go through the motions of life as if life is nothing but movement.
I can never really settle down on whether these people are living the worst of life or the best. Their life seems dark yet the unaware soul is free of the struggles of the brain.
Then there are those that achieve really great things. Really big things. They keep doing stuff, new and old. All their life is nothing but the pursuit of greatness. But such greatness is often hollow and limited to fame, money and magazine covers. They are in the rat race of achieving. As if achieving is meaningful at all. Everyone loves this rat racer but only the senseful realize that ambition is best controlled and happiness best when sustainable.
Those who don’t fit either of these two go on to become something bigger, something more pious. They become spiritual. They tend to believe that the best way to be at peace with this world is to detach from it. That getting away brings them closer to something more tangible and something more grounded. They follow ideologies, sects, religions, philosophies and ways of living that others may find eccentric. They are in the rat race to achieve something so intangible, so vague that they have settled for a very lazy word for it- enlightenment.
Enlightened or not, they too follow a pursuit to no end. They achieve little while they are alive and only fire or earth when they die.
But even those who think of completely new and original ways of living are in a rat race. These people are at the forefront of human thought and wisdom. They create things that never existed, their thoughts are ideas born for the first time and their words uttered never before. They pursue something far more bizarre- an attempt to fill a void with explanations, theories and creations. They make life easy for the rest of us and pave the way in the darkness and yet their own pursuit brings them ever closer to the void of emptiness.
Humans in all their glory have forgotten that this place (the universe or beyond) where we live is completely void of reasons, explanations and meaning. That life just is. It exists and nothing more.
And to bide our time in this morbid world where only death frees us from the rat race, we live together in the biggest one. A rat race of a life that we can call our own.
