A rat race is an endless, self-defeating, or pointless pursuit. The phrase equates humans to rats attempting to earn a reward such as cheese, in vain. It may also refer to a competitive struggle to get ahead financially or routinely.
The term is commonly associated with an exhausting, repetitive lifestyle that leaves no time for relaxation or enjoyment.
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.
By the 1930s actual rat races of some sort are frequently mentioned among carnival and gambling attractions. [1]
By 1934, "rat-race" was also used in reference to aviation training, referring to a "follow-the-leader" game in which a trainee fighter pilot had to copy all the actions (loops, rolls, spins, Immelmann turns etc.) performed by an experienced pilot.
From 1939, the phrase took on the meaning of "competitive struggle" referring to a person's work and life. [2]
The Rat Race was used as a title for a novel written by Jay Franklin in 1947 for Colliers Magazine and first published in book form in 1950. It is dedicated To those few rats in Washington who do not carry brief-cases.
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. "They are accelerating us too," he says, in a voice that still betrays a trace of the accent of his native Holland. In protesting against the speedup, Goudsmit can speak with authority, for in the course of only a few years, he, like many other contemporary physicists, has seen his way of life change from a tranquil one of contemplation to a rat race.
Philip K. Dick used the term in "The Last of the Masters" published in 1954:
"Maybe," McLean said softly, "you and I can then get off this rat race. You and I and all the rest of us. And live like human beings." "Rat race," Fowler murmured. "Rats in a maze. Doing tricks. Performing chores thought up by somebody else." McClean caught Fowler's eye. "By somebody of another species."
Jim Bishop [4] used the term rat race in his book The Golden Ham: A Candid Biography of Jackie Gleason. The term occurs in a letter Jackie Gleason wrote to his wife in which he says: "Television is a rat race, and remember this, even if you win you are still a rat."
William H. Whyte used the term rat race in The Organization Man published in 1956: [5]
The word collective most of them can't bring themselves to use—except to describe foreign countries or organizations they don't work for—but they are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are to organization than were their elders. They are wry about it, to be sure; they talk of the "treadmill," the "rat race," of the inability to control one's direction.
Merle A. Tuve used the term rat race in a 1959 article entitled "Is Science Too Big for the Scientist?", writing: [6]
There is a growing conviction among many of my friends in academic circles that the university today is no place for a scholar in science. 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.That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
"Escaping the rat race" can have a number of different meanings:
Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents. Species of rats are found throughout the order Rodentia, but stereotypical rats are found in the genus Rattus. Other rat genera include Neotoma, Bandicota and Dipodomys.
John Herbert Gleason, known as Jackie Gleason, was an American actor, comedian, writer, and composer also known as "The Great One". He developed a style and characters from growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy, exemplified by his city bus driver character Ralph Kramden in the television series The Honeymooners. He also developed The Jackie Gleason Show, which maintained high ratings from the mid-1950s through 1970. The series originated in New York City, but filming moved to Miami Beach, Florida, in 1964 after Gleason took up permanent residence there.
Easy listening is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to the 1970s. It is related to middle of the road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs, non-rock vocals and instrumental covers of selected popular rock songs. It mostly concentrates on music that pre-dates the rock and roll era, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s. It was differentiated from the mostly instrumental beautiful music format by its variety of styles, including a percentage of vocals, arrangements and tempos to fit various parts of the broadcast day.
Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof is an Irish singer-songwriter and political activist. He rose to prominence in the late 1970s as the lead singer of the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats, who achieved popularity as part of the punk rock movement. The band had UK number one hits with his co-compositions "Rat Trap" and "I Don't Like Mondays". Geldof starred as Pink in Pink Floyd's 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall. As a fundraiser, Geldof organised the charity supergroup Band Aid and the concerts Live Aid and Live 8, and co-wrote "Do They Know It's Christmas?", one of the best-selling singles to date.
The Boomtown Rats are an Irish rock/new wave band originally formed in Dublin in 1975. Between 1977 and 1985, they had a series of Irish and UK hits including "Like Clockwork", "Rat Trap", "I Don't Like Mondays" and "Banana Republic". The original line-up comprised six musicians; five from Dún Laoghaire in County Dublin; Gerry Cott, Simon Crowe (drums), Johnnie Fingers (keyboards), Bob Geldof (vocals) and Garry Roberts, plus Fingers' cousin Pete Briquette (bass). The Boomtown Rats broke up in 1986, but reformed in 2013, without Fingers or Cott. Garry Roberts died in 2022. The band's fame and notability have been overshadowed by the charity work of frontman Bob Geldof, a former journalist with the New Musical Express.
The dentate gyrus (DG) is part of the hippocampal formation in the temporal lobe of the brain, which also includes the hippocampus and the subiculum. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit and is thought to contribute to the formation of new episodic memories, the spontaneous exploration of novel environments and other functions.
Edward Chace Tolman was an American psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Through Tolman's theories and works, he founded what is now a branch of psychology known as purposive behaviorism. Tolman also promoted the concept known as latent learning first coined by Blodgett (1929). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tolman as the 45th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Observer bias is one of the types of detection bias and is defined as any kind of systematic divergence from accurate facts during observation and the recording of data and information in studies. The definition can be further expanded upon to include the systematic difference between what is observed due to variation in observers, and what the true value is.
In ballet, the corps de ballet is the group of dancers who are not principal dancers or soloists. They are a permanent part of the ballet company and often work as a backdrop for the principal dancers.
In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, spatial memory is a form of memory responsible for the recording and recovery of information needed to plan a course to a location and to recall the location of an object or the occurrence of an event. Spatial memory is necessary for orientation in space. Spatial memory can also be divided into egocentric and allocentric spatial memory. A person's spatial memory is required to navigate in a familiar city. A rat's spatial memory is needed to learn the location of food at the end of a maze. In both humans and animals, spatial memories are summarized as a cognitive map.
Campbell Island / Motu Ihupuku is an uninhabited subantarctic island of New Zealand, and the main island of the Campbell Island group. It covers 112.68 square kilometres (43.51 sq mi) of the group's 113.31 km2 (43.75 sq mi), and is surrounded by numerous stacks, rocks and islets like Dent Island, Folly Island, Isle de Jeanette-Marie, and Jacquemart Island, the latter being the southernmost extremity of New Zealand. The island is mountainous, rising to over 500 metres (1,640 ft) in the south. A long fiord, Perseverance Harbour, nearly bisects it, opening out to sea on the east coast.
The Teddy Roosevelt Terrier is a small to medium-sized American hunting terrier. It is lower-set, with shorter legs, and is more muscular with heavier bone density than the related American Rat Terrier. Much diversity exists in the history of the Teddy Roosevelt Terrier breed, and it shares a common early history with the American Rat Terrier, Fox Paulistinha, and Tenterfield Terrier. The Rat Terrier's background is said to stem from the terriers or other dogs that were brought over by early English and other working-class immigrants. Since the breed was a farm, hunting, and utility dog, little to no planned breeding was used other than breeding dogs with agreeable traits to each other to produce the desired work ethic in the dog. The Feist (dog), Bull Terrier, Smooth Fox Terrier, Manchester Terrier, Whippet, Italian Greyhound, the now extinct English White Terrier, Turnspit Dog, and Wry-legged Terrier all share in the Teddy Roosevelt Terrier's ancestry. These early ratting terriers were then most likely bred to the Beagle or Beagle crossbred dogs and other dogs. Maximizing the influences from these various breeds provides the modern Teddy Roosevelt Terrier with a keen sense of awareness and prey drive, an acute sense of smell, and a very high intellect. Although they tend to be aloof with strangers, they are devoted companion dogs with a strong desire to please and be near their owners at all times.
A cognitive map is a type of mental representation used by an individual to order their personal store of information about their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment, and the relationship of its component parts. The concept was introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948. He tried to explain the behavior of rats that appeared to learn the spatial layout of a maze, and subsequently the concept was applied to other animals, including humans. The term was later generalized by some researchers, especially in the field of operations research, to refer to a kind of semantic network representing an individual's personal knowledge or schemas.
Christopher John Millar, known by his stage name Rat Scabies, is a musician best known as the drummer for English punk rock band the Damned.
Laboratory rats or lab rats are strains of the rat subspecies Rattus norvegicus domestica which are bred and kept for scientific research. While less commonly used for research than laboratory mice, rats have served as an important animal model for research in psychology and biomedical science.
Street Rats was the eighth studio album by the English rock group Humble Pie, released in 1975. The album went to number 100 on the US Billboard 200 album chart.
Lorrie Sprecher is an American writer, musician, and activist.
"Rat Pack" is the 54th episode of the HBO original series The Sopranos and is the second of the show's fifth season. Written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Alan Taylor, it originally aired on March 14, 2004.
Chicago XXXII: Stone of Sisyphus is the twenty-first studio album, and thirty-second overall, by Chicago. Often referred to as their "lost" album, it was recorded in 1993 and originally intended to be released as Stone of Sisyphus on March 22, 1994, as their eighteenth studio album and twenty-second total album. However, the album was unexpectedly and controversially rejected by the record company, which reportedly contributed to Chicago's later decision to leave their services entirely. Even after the band acquired the rights to their catalog, the album remained unreleased until June 17, 2008, after a delay of fourteen years and ten more albums.
Purposive behaviorism is a branch of psychology that was introduced by Edward Tolman. It combines the study of behavior while also considering the purpose or goal of behavior. Tolman thought that learning developed from knowledge about the environment and how the organism relates to its environment. Tolman's goal was to identify the complex cognitive mechanisms and purposes that guided behavior. His theories on learning went against the traditionally accepted stimulus-response connections at his time that had been proposed by other psychologists such as Edward Thorndike. Tolman disagreed with John B.Watson's behaviorism, so he initiated his own behaviorism, which became known as purposive behaviorism.
