People Competing in a Hamster Wheel

“In our country,” Alice said, still catching her breath a little, “if you run very fast for a long time, like we’ve just done, you generally end up somewhere else.”
“What a slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

 

If you slow down for even a moment, you fall behind. You have to keep running hard just to stay where you are. It feels like a reflection of our current reality. Whether or not author Lewis Carroll intended it, this part of a novel written about 150 years ago seems to mirror our present situation.

We are like hamsters running on a wheel. The difference is that we’re not running alone—everyone is on the same wheel. Most people know that if we all slow down, things would be easier, but we can’t. We know that if we relax even a little, we’ll fall.

 

Some people speed up because they want to get ahead. Then others increase their speed to keep up. Those who can’t keep pace fall behind and are left out. Watching others stumble, people feel like winners. The speed continues to increase as more people compete to become the ultimate victor. And more and more people fall behind.

 

In the end, are those left standing the winners? Can they stop the wheel? Having adapted to the fast pace, they can no longer tolerate a slower-moving wheel. At some point, they will realize that only in death can the wheel finally stop.

Why are we competing and rushing so much? What will we have left before we close our eyes for the last time? Since the moment “money” became the measure of happiness, we’ve pushed ourselves into endless competition to earn more than others. Why must we live clinging so tightly to pieces of paper that we can neither eat nor wear, things that don’t even exist in nature and seem utterly useless by themselves?

 

Can we ever escape this hamster wheel? Or will we at least be able to slow it down enough to take a moment to look around us?