The Rat Race
I am sick but not too sick. This kind of annoying sickness that pushes you to not do anything but also you cannot just sit still. Itching to do something but not sure what. Me being me, I did what I always do: opened my laptop, checked a recruiter email, then opened my humongous budget sheet — someone told me once I need a CFO to manage my finances, and honestly they were not wrong. Yes, all of that. Because apparently this is what rest looks like for me.
But somewhere in the middle of all of that, I just stopped. What am I doing here?
We are the most comfortable humans who have ever lived. And we are absolutely terrified.
Not terrified of something specific. Just terrified. Of falling behind. Of missing something. Of the future arriving before we are ready for it. And here is the thing nobody says out loud: the fear is not accidental. It is a product. Someone is selling it to you, and it is working.
We sell fear to our children so they study harder. We sell fear to ourselves so we consume more. We sell the fear that things will not last so we grab more of them before they disappear. The news sells it. The market sells it. Your LinkedIn feed sells it. And the more we buy it, the more real it feels, until one day you cannot tell the difference between a genuine threat and a very well-targeted notification.
AI, geopolitics, inflation, career, relevance — pick your fear. There is a subscription for all of them.
One job is not enough anymore. One career is not enough. One income stream is a risk, two is a minimum, three is where you start to relax — or so the story goes. Everyone is building a side hustle, launching a course, starting a newsletter, flipping something. Not because they love it. Because the fear of the future is so loud that standing still feels like falling behind.
Friends who stopped sleeping because they are building apps. We sit together now and call it a gathering, but half the table is checking if their agents are still running or discussing how to get more tokens. Nobody is fully there. The apps need us more than the people do, apparently.
I am not judging them. I am one of them. I am the person who built the most optimized possible version of a day — work, family, reading, studying, sport, all of it scheduled, all of it tracked — and then complained, sincerely, that life felt stressful. The compression was my idea. The suffocation surprised me anyway.
This is what the machine does. It makes you a very enthusiastic participant in your own exhaustion.
Scholars who changed the world didn’t optimize for output. They had questions that wouldn’t leave them alone. They worked until the question was answered or until the sun went down, and then they stopped. Not because they were lazy. Because they were finished for the day. The idea of optimizing every waking hour for output would have made no sense to them. Output was the byproduct. The thinking was the point.
We reversed it somewhere. Now the output is the point, and the thinking — the real, slow, unscheduled kind — is the thing we feel guilty about.
So here is the question I keep coming back to, the one that arrived uninvited on that sick afternoon between the recruiter email and account number two:
If you woke up tomorrow and the fear was gone — not the circumstances, just the fear — what would you actually do?
Not what you are supposed to do. Not what makes sense on paper. Not what the people who know you would expect. If nobody was watching and nothing was at risk and you were not trying to prove anything to anyone including yourself — what would the day look like?
Most people, when they sit with that question long enough, realize they have not thought about it seriously in years. The machine is loud. It is designed to be loud. Silence is where the question lives, and silence does not have a monetization strategy.
I am not saying quit everything. I am not saying delete your apps and disappear into the mountains. I am not even saying slow down, because that has become its own kind of performance — the person who makes a whole thing about doing less, broadcasting their simplicity like a new optimization strategy.
I am asking something harder. Are you running because you love where you are going? Or are you running because stopping feels dangerous?
Because those two things look identical from the outside. Same hours. Same hustle. Same results maybe. But one of them is yours and one of them belongs to the machine.
Only you know which one it is. And if you are not sure — that is probably your answer.