The Rat Race – Your reason for disappointed times

Put essentially, the rat race is our battle for survival inside the boundaries of society. This could mean diverse things, depending on your position in society:

• If you’re poor, it implies fighting for fundamental needs like food, shelter, and clothing.
• If you’re middle class, it implies having a career, 2 kids, paying off your loans and saving for retirement.
• If you’re wealthy, it implies securing your riches from other individuals and buying costly things to awe your indeed wealthier friends.

But no matter to which class you belong to, the rat race continuously includes a steady fight for cash, control, status, and popularity — the foremost critical monetary forms of our rat-race society.

The Idealized Trap

It’s interesting that these currencies have no existential value in themselves. They only work when they are used in relation to other people. To make it clear:

You can’t be famous on a deserted island.

No money in the world will help if gold or silver is the only accepted currency.

Looking beautiful will not help if you stay at home all day (and don’t use social media).

However, within the human rat race, these artificial incentives are constantly promoted as the most valuable resources, and on this basis, we base our comparisons and frame our personality.

Who has the most expensive car? How can you become richer than anyone else? Who’s the most popular?

Such questions generate societal pressure to visit trendy places, do new things, and achieve always bigger goals. Nobody wants to be left behind, right?

That’s why we are racing against each other in pursuit of these artificial incentives.

However, we neglect the fact that this race leads nowhere and will never end.

Do think about it for a moment.

From the moment you came into this world, you’ve been sucked in by society’s expectations to compete, improve, and achieve. You are constantly striving for the next better thing, be it more expensive outfit, a bigger house, or a more successful career.

You sacrifice time, energy, and money to feel good in the future, never being truly satisfied in the present moment.

The reason why You’re Addicted to Security

Like how matter is built of atoms, the rat race is built of its own small building blocks.

Fundamentally, society consists of people — a lot of them. And when people interact with each other, it gets messy, sometimes even violent. That’s just what happens when different ideas, beliefs, and groups collide with each other.

The fundamental question that arises is how to control this resulting chaos?

To solve this problem efficiently, our leaders have done what great emperors like Julius Caesar and Napoleon always have done throughout human history to control large crowds:

Divide et impera: Divide and conquer, probably the most powerful control strategy ever.

And indeed, we have kept dividing as if there’s no tomorrow. We started to draw borders and to build walls — small, middle, and big ones. As a consequence, countries, cities, religions, political parties, companies, sports clubs, families, hobbies, and music styles have emerged.

But as we kept building these walls, society became more and more fragmented.

So yeah, to keep it short, at this moment in time, the most fundamental building block of society (and the human rat race) is this: The Containers.

A container is built of stable material, separated from its surroundings by 4 solid walls, and has stuff inside. In regard to the rat race, however, I’m not referring to physical, but metaphorical containers.

Therefore, in our context, a container has only two components:

First of all, a container consists of people. You can call them members, fans, or supporters. They live inside a container or at least visit that container from time to time.

Besides that, every container has a collective mind, which consists of rules, expectations, dreams, assumptions, fears, and prejudices of the members.

In order to analyze this concept, let’s take climate activism for example. Here’s how the corresponding container could look like — from a naive perspective, admittedly.

Containers keep things ordered. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by the infinite complexity of life:

Whom can I trust? What’s important in life? What should be my next career move? Who will help me when I become sick? What’s the best diet?

These kinds of questions are much easier to answer when we live inside containers. Instead of solving all of these problems on our own, we rather trust the collective mind by using proven container knowledge.

“Just stay in your little containers, and everything will be fine”

Sure, you’re allowed to switch containers from time to time. You can move to another city, change your hobbies, or your social circle, but containers are still supposed to serve as your main social constructs when you are interacting with society.

So, to put it simply, society creates a grid for your life and expects you to play after their rules.

And it certainly works — we love our little containers. We love our sports clubs, our WhatsApp groups, and our favorite restaurants.

They give us a sense of security. Containers are warm, cozy, and full of people who have the same opinions and interests as we do.

Therefore, it’s no wonder that we stay in them almost all the time. Who wants to be outside anyway? It’s lonely out there, it’s cold, it’s dark and there’s no electricity.

Container is your Comfort Zone Where the Herd Mentality controls you.

the more you participate within a container, the more you crave approval from its container members. You start to compare yourself with other people, based on artificial incentives of the human rat race — money, status, power, and fame.

And once you do that, you’re already a runner inside the rat race. If you live inside containers all the time, independent thinking won’t come easy to you. Not only that, but you will be in a state of constant fear, worrying about what other members might think about your actions. Out of this fear, you will always play it safe, be it in your job, in your social life, or when being faced with important life decisions.

Container thinking is the driving force behind the human rat race. Can you ESCAPE ?