The Rat race of Moder life . How the societies are drowsing you in your life?
Race of Life: How Societies Are Drowsing You In Your Life. re we trapped inside containers?
What’s the rat race of life? And what’s its hidden purpose?
Put simply, the rat race is our fight for survival within the boundaries of society. This can mean different things, depending on your position in society:
- If you are poor, it means fighting for basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing.
- If you are middle class, it means having a career, 2.1 kids, paying off your mortgage, and saving for retirement.
- If you are rich, it means protecting your wealth from other people and buying expensive things to impress your even richer friends.
But no matter to which class you belong to, the rat race always involves a constant battle for money, power, status, and fame — the most important currencies of our rat-race society.
The Perfect Bait
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.
- All the money in the world doesn’t help if gold is the only accepted currency.
- Being beautiful isn’t helpful 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 start comparing ourselves to other people.
Who has the most expensive car? How can you become richer than anyone else? Who’s the most popular?
Questions like these generate societal pressure to visit trendy places, do new things, and achieve always bigger goals. Nobody wants to fall 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.
Let’s think about it for a second.
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 thing, be it more expensive clothes, 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.
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.
The Secret Sauce
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:
Yup, 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.
Why We Need Containers
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.
Tetris of Life
If you compare society to a computer game, it behaves a lot like Tetris:
Our society offers a predefined set of building blocks to play the game of life
From a macro perspective, the biggest containers in your life are its stages: nursery school, school, college, working life, retirement.
On a life timeline, these big blocks look like this (not true to scale):
Additionally to these stages, your life consists of life aspects. Your professional life, family, friends, hobbies, fitness, and so on. In every life stage, these aspects play a significant part in your life (ok, maybe except fitness in nursery school). So let’s add them to your timeline:
In the figure above, you can see a lot of containers. More specifically, it shows 6 areas * 5 life stages — 1 (fitness in nursery school) = 29 containers.
And it doesn’t stop there; if we drill down further, these containers have sub-containers. For example, the school has subjects like maths, history, physics, or sports and your company consists of business departments like sales, marketing, and IT.
The Containers of Life
As long as you stay inside your containers, society promises you to be happy. You will be able to live a relatively protected life.
Container life is simple and doesn’t involve a lot of risks: if everything works out fine, you smoothly walk from one big container to the next. According to the motto:
“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.
Containers Are Comfortable
Containers have one strange characteristic.
The moment you become one of their members, you will start to make compromises in your life. Not intentionally, it’s just the price you have to pay to be part of something bigger than yourself.
Slowly but steadily, your personal opinions, ambitions, and dreams will be replaced by the collective mind of the container. This all-embracing mind becomes the new navigation system in your life. It’s a simple exchange: more safety and stability for less individuality and creativity.
Your thinking and actions will inevitably change because you’re adapting to the collective mind — without you even noticing it. Maybe you give up your musical ambitions in favor of your stressful career. Or you buy a bigger car you can’t even afford — just to impress your colleagues.
Rest assured, the possibilities of the rat race are endless.
But not only that, 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.
Does Herd Mentality Control You?
As we’ve seen, containers have their justification to exist. It gets, however, dangerous when you trust your containers too much. If you don’t question the collective mind from time to time, you will get sucked in by the rat race and your personal growth will suffer:
- Too much container thinking leads to herd mentality.
- Too much safety in your containers leads to risk-aversion and complacency.
- Too much sense of community leads to the loss of your individuality.
Mainstream Containers
A typical life within containers limits your thinking and can easily lead to dangerous thought patterns like oversimplified reasoning or prejudices.
This is especially the case with big containers with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of members. The bigger a container gets, the more its collective mind gets infiltrated by mainstream opinions and generalized black-white thinking. And as soon as you start to question these mainstream opinions, container members will start to attack you.
For example, let’s take climate activism. Within that container, simple thought patterns like these buzz around:
- If (s)he uses plastic, (s)he’s a bad person.
- If (s)he doesn’t like Greta Thunberg, (s)he’s not one of us.
- If (s)he drives an SUV, (s)he is a squanderer.
These claims may be true or not, but they don’t reflect the whole personality of a human being. We tend to (d)evaluate other human beings, based on superficial assumptions we have learned from our containers.
If you live inside containers all the time, independent thinking won’t come easy to you. You will always look for solutions outside of yourself and eventually loose your inner compass.
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.
The formula is straightforward:
Container thinking is the driving force behind the human rat race
But can we escape?
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thankyou , youare good creater
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