{"id":175,"date":"2022-03-19T19:37:32","date_gmt":"2022-03-19T19:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/?p=175"},"modified":"2023-05-09T07:01:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T07:01:32","slug":"the-rat-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/2022\/03\/19\/the-rat-race\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rat Race &#8211; Your reason for disappointed times"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"itemIntroText\">\n<p>Just a wandering thought that strikes our mind..<\/p>\n<p>We are trapped inside the dark unbreathable BOXES. We are the Rats !<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s the rat race of life? And what\u2019s its hidden purpose?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"itemFullText\">\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you&#8217;re poor, it implies fighting for fundamental needs like food, shelter, and clothing.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re middle class, it implies having a career, 2 kids, paying off your loans and saving for retirement.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re wealthy, it implies securing your riches from other individuals and buying costly things to awe your indeed wealthier friends.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But no matter to which class you belong to, the rat race continuously includes a steady fight for cash, control, status, and popularity \u2014 the foremost critical monetary forms of our rat-race society.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Idealized Trap<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n<p><em>You can\u2019t be famous on a deserted island.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>No money in the world will help if gold or silver is the only accepted currency.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Looking beautiful will not help if you stay at home all day (and don\u2019t use social media).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><em>Who has the most expensive car? How can you become richer than anyone else? Who\u2019s the most popular?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Such questions generate societal pressure to visit trendy places, do new things, and achieve always bigger goals. Nobody wants to be left behind, right?<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why we are racing against each other in pursuit of these artificial incentives.<\/p>\n<p>However, we neglect the fact that this race leads nowhere and will never end.<\/p>\n<p>Do think about it for a moment.<\/p>\n<p>From the moment you came into this world, you\u2019ve been sucked in by society\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>You sacrifice time, energy, and money to feel good in the future, never being truly satisfied in the present moment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The reason why You\u2019re Addicted to Security<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Like how matter is built of atoms, the rat race is built of its own small building blocks.<\/p>\n<p>Fundamentally, society consists of people \u2014 a lot of them. And when people interact with each other, it gets messy, sometimes even violent. That\u2019s just what happens when different ideas, beliefs, and groups collide with each other.<\/p>\n<p>The fundamental question that arises is how to control this resulting chaos?<\/p>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<p>Divide et impera: Divide and conquer, probably the most powerful control strategy ever.<\/p>\n<p>And indeed, we have kept dividing as if there\u2019s no tomorrow. We started to draw borders and to build walls \u2014 small, middle, and big ones. As a consequence, countries, cities, religions, political parties, companies, sports clubs, families, hobbies, and music styles have emerged.<\/p>\n<p>But as we kept building these walls, society became more and more fragmented.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019m not referring to physical, but metaphorical containers.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, in our context, a container has only two components:<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Besides that, every container has a collective mind, which consists of rules, expectations, dreams, assumptions, fears, and prejudices of the members.<\/p>\n<p>In order to analyze this concept, let\u2019s take climate activism for example. Here\u2019s how the corresponding container could look like \u2014 from a naive perspective, admittedly.<\/p>\n<p>Containers keep things ordered. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by the infinite complexity of life:<\/p>\n<p>Whom can I trust? What\u2019s important in life? What should be my next career move? Who will help me when I become sick? What\u2019s the best diet?<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>\u201cJust stay in your little containers, and everything will be fine\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sure, you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<p>So, to put it simply, society creates a grid for your life and expects you to play after their rules.<\/p>\n<p>And it certainly works \u2014 we love our little containers. We love our sports clubs, our WhatsApp groups, and our favorite restaurants.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, it\u2019s no wonder that we stay in them almost all the time. Who wants to be outside anyway? It\u2019s lonely out there, it\u2019s cold, it\u2019s dark and there\u2019s no electricity.<\/p>\n<p><em>Container is your Comfort Zone Where the Herd Mentality controls you.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 money, status, power, and fame.<\/p>\n<p>And once you do that, you\u2019re already a runner inside the rat race. If you live inside containers all the time, independent thinking won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>Container thinking is the driving force behind the human rat race. Can you ESCAPE ?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a wandering thought that strikes our mind.. We are trapped inside the dark unbreathable BOXES. We are the Rats ! What\u2019s the rat race of life? And what\u2019s its hidden purpose? Put essentially, the rat race is our battle for survival inside the boundaries of society. This could mean diverse things, depending on your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wandering-thoughts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/fc1da7257992fc36032e11db3df7a664_M1-e1701246359186.jpg?fit=200%2C113&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philosoul.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}