At age five, you start school. Most of your waking life is then spent in education, until you graduate and get a job. You spend the next half a century working to afford a car, house, and family; and eventually you get to the point of financial comfort - right before you die.

It's the scrambling to "get ahead" much like rats in a maze scrambling to get the cheese at the end.

Usually used in the context of the corporate world where people are constantly comparing themselves to one another & worrying about falling behind.

Are you asking like... in a philosophical way? Or you just want to know what people mean by it?

It's just that we tend to set off in life with the goal of achieving some form of material wealth. We get lost in our careers or whatever we do to stay to keep busy and/or to stay alive. Like rats in a lab, we often don't see the big picture and, in some ways, what we want and what we're supposed to want is controlled by people who are more powerful than we are and are far out of our reach (not necessarily in a conspiracy kind of way, it's just that most of us are less powerful than actual powerful people). We feel like we're moving forward in life but really we're not going anywhere, which is obvious if you look at it from the lab worker's perspective.

I guess it's a somewhat sanctimonious way to look at, especially, the middle class life. But some people really do seem, at least to me, to really get lost in this pointless race. The race to a bigger house and a bigger TV and another gadget, some botox injections or a meal in the hottest restaurant, and never seem to really give it another thought. Maybe that's the "healthy" way to live life? Just not to think about it too hard.

Author Robert Kiyosaki also used the "rat race" as a term in his book Rich dad, poor dad, collectively referring to the things middle class people do wrong which keep them in a cycle of not achieving true wealth. He even built a board game around it which was somehow meant to train the mindset of escaping the rat race. I've never played that game. Maybe that's why I'm not rich.

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I think you have a great question because I’ve heard and used the term “rat race” but never wondered where it came from… like was there some epic race between rats that was so especially bonkers that people used it to describe what society has become?? Or, like, are we talking about a race of rats that keeps itself especially busy??

Edit: spelling

#ELI5

Scientists studying things about the human body, often study the same things in animals. Like, they might test a drug on mice, because if they get it wrong, and the mice die ... well that's sad, but it's not as bad as a human dying.

So at one point, pretend they test some drugs that "makes people smarter". They test it on rats first (in case it kills the rat!).

They put normal rats into a maze, with cheese at the end. Then they time how long it takes the rat to get to the cheese.

Then every week they give the rat a little of the "smarter drug". And then they re-test the rat, to see if it found the cheese faster.

Sometimes they put smart AND dumb rats in the same maze at the same time. Now it's a race to the cheese, and maybe the smarter one wins?

Okay so far?

Now imagine what it's like to be that rat. Your entire life, your entire reason for existing, is to navigate the maze, and find the cheese. Did you find an all-expense paid vacation? No. Did you find a truckload of gold? No. You just found ... cheese.

And once you find the cheese ... what then? Well you eat the cheese, and you're happy for a few minutes. And then you go back into your cage, and do the same damn thing again tomorrow, and the next day, AND THE NEXT DAY.

Now you're an office worker.  You work at your desk.  You try and do your job.  You get paid at the end of the week.  You take your paycheck home, buy food, pay rent, buy gasoline .... 

And then you wake up Monday morning and DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN.  For what?  For wealth?  For a life of ease?  No.  You do it for "cheese", for a tiny bit of happiness.  And your entire life is just this repeated daily repetition, over and over, for apparently no big benefit.

**Don't you feel a little like that rat??**

Don't you feel like you're in a "rat race"?

Rat race is just like what it sounds, rat racing in a maze for food.

It's pointless and the race never ends. winning the race just means the rat waits for the next maze/race.

When applied to human, it basically looks at life as pointless. You grow up, spend your life working, then retire. Sure, you went on vacations, met your soulmate, have kids and whatnot. But just like the cheese, its temperate. it's pointless, and at the end of the day, everything you ever done holds no purpose except prolonging your life. and come a few hundred years, everything about you is erased. The cycle of pointlessness is why we call it the rat race.