the.com/rat race
A competition where winning just means you get to keep competing.
means The exhausting, repetitive grind of a career or modern working life, where endless effort mostly just maintains your current position rather than getting you ahead.
from The image comes from laboratory rats running mazes or wheels for a reward — frantic, scrabbling motion that goes nowhere. The phrase caught on in the mid-20th century as a bleak shorthand for commuting, office competition, and chasing promotions, with 'race' underlining that everyone's scrambling but no one actually crosses a finish line.
- origin
- Pilots called dogfight drills rat races in the 1930s
- irony
- Real rats in mazes stop running once fed
- exit myth
- Quitting rarely ends it, it just changes the cage