THE RAT RACE STARTS IN SCHOOL...
Imagine this. You wake up early every day, rush to a place you do not love, spend hours doing tasks that drain your energy, and return home too exhausted to think about your own dreams. Then you repeat it all the next day. Work, pay bills, sleep, repeat. This is the blueprint of modern existence.
But what if the cycle doesn’t start with your first job? What if the rat race begins much earlier—inside the classroom? From the moment we enter school, we are told what to do, what to think, when to speak, and even when we may meet our own basic needs. We are graded on conformity, rewarded for obedience, and slowly trained to become cogs in a machine that values productivity over purpose.
The modern school system was designed not to cultivate dreamers, but disciplined workers. The schedule, the bells, the repetitive tasks—they mirror the structure of industrial labor. And by the time we graduate, many have lost touch with their inner curiosity, the spark that makes us human.
Education is said to be the path to freedom, yet most schooling is a subtle form of domestication. It teaches us to pass tests, not to understand ourselves. It prioritizes external validation over self-discovery. And so we enter adulthood seeking approval from bosses, peers, and society, rather than building our own autonomy.
Have you noticed how schools rarely teach emotional intelligence, financial literacy, or how to find meaning in what we do? Most people leave school not knowing who they are, what they love, or what truly matters to them. Instead, they learn to chase approval, and obedience becomes the rule of life.
This conditioning continues into the workplace. Alarms replace bells, bosses replace teachers, performance reviews replace grades, and fear of failure persists, just under a different name. Creativity is sacrificed for efficiency, individuality is replaced by roles, and compliance is rewarded with permission to keep running.
And then there’s technology. In the digital age, the classroom has changed—but the lesson remains. Screens and algorithms shape our attention, guide our decisions, and exploit our desire for validation. Every scroll, click, and notification reinforces the same lesson we learned in school: stay busy, follow the rules, keep striving.
We confuse stillness with laziness, silence with boredom, solitude with loneliness. But these are the moments where clarity, creativity, and self-awareness are born. The truth, always, must come from within, not from external approval.
Awareness is the first step. Recognize how your time and attention are being harvested. Notice when you act out of habit, fear, or obligation rather than choice. Awareness transforms compulsion into power. Once you see the invisible systems around you, you can begin to reclaim your most precious resources: your time, your mind, your sense of wonder.
The next step is alignment. Ask yourself: What do I truly value? What would I pursue if no one were watching? If there were no grades, bosses, or social metrics? Facing these questions is uncomfortable because they confront you with your own forgotten freedom—but freedom always requires courage.
To live differently, start small. Disconnect from noise. Spend time without screens, without agendas. Read to understand, work to express, create because it feels alive within you. When you stop chasing what society tells you to want, space opens for what you actually desire. That space is sacred. There, the part of yourself that was suppressed—the part that dreams, questions, and creates—can emerge.
Freedom is not somewhere outside you. It begins in how you perceive your world. The rat race loses its grip when the internal race ends. Ask yourself: Are you living by design, or by default? Are you building a life consciously, or following a script someone else wrote?
The rat race starts at school, but it can end the moment you decide to stop running. The finish line was never out there—it was always within you. In the quiet that follows, you can find yourself free, awake, and alive.
