Rat race

The phrase is sometimes used to relate the human life to that of rats attempting to earn an ultimately pointless reward when death is inevitable.

In the late 1800s, the term "rat-run" was used meaning "maze-like passages by which rats move about their territory", commonly used in a derogatory sense.

The term "rat race" was used in an article about Samuel Goudsmit published in 1953 entitled: A Farewell to String and Sealing Wax~I in which Daniel Lang[3] wrote: Sometimes when his sardonic mood is on him, he wonders whether the synchrotrons, the betatrons, the cosmotrons, and all the other contrivances physicists have lately rigged up to create energy by accelerating particles of matter aren't playing a wry joke on their inventors.

"Jim Bishop[4] used the term rat race in his book The Golden Ham: A Candid Biography of Jackie Gleason.

A professor's life nowadays is a rat-race of busyness and activity, managing contracts and projects, guiding teams of assistants, bossing crews of technicians, making numerous trips, sitting on committees for government agencies, and engaging in other distractions necessary to keep the whole frenetic business from collapse.David Foster Wallace used the term rat race in his 2005 commencement speech entitled "The Most Precious Freedom":[7] The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, (unglamourous) ways every day.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.