Rat Race

When I was young people used to talk about the rat race, the 9 to 5 lifestyle and overwork. Now people talk about work-life balance, the 9 to 6 lifestyle and burnout. What has changed ? Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness changed nothing. The Industrial Revolution and opportunity to free mankind from the drudgery of labour, according to Russell, but instead created production lines and new ways of working yourself to an early grave. The Information Revolution has happened since my youth with its talk of the rat race and it could also have helped remove the drudgery from people’s lives. Instead the time savings from automatisation, computerisation and accessibility of information have been eaten up with more things to do. People struggle to compete with each other at work, to work ever longer hours, to exploit your workers ever more, to sacrifice your personal life, happiness and health to climb the greasy pole. Why do they do this ? I suppose evolution has programmed us this way. On the savanna, early humans had an evolutionary imperative to be the biggest, fastest, strongest mate, the alpha male competing for dominance to increase mating opportunities. Nowadays that imperative lives on as a residual trait, which you can see when someone overtakes you on the motorway only to pull in before and slow down, forcing you to drop your speed. Why overtake a car which is moving slower than you want to drive ? Dominance = more sex. Why trample over your co-workers to get a promotion which you don’t really need to pay the rent ? Dominance = more sex. Why almost have a heart attack to win a few points playing squash ? Dominance = more sex. Always the same answer. And why do you have women sometimes doing the same thing ? For the same reason as men have nipples, albeit less prominent than those of women … no evolutionary cost so the trait is shared. We men are all just apes, trying to pound our chests louder than each other, trying to control all the bananas and impregnate all the female apes. That is why we still work 40 -60 hours per week. I wonder why an intellect like Russell’s missed that. Maybe he was too much of an optimist ? Or maybe he was distracted by a nearby banana …