The Oxford Dictionary defines a rat race as “a way of life in which people are caught in a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth or power." In a shocking twist, Urban Dictionary similarly defines it as a “frustrating, hard-to-break lifestyle." Anytime these two sources agree, you know you are getting accurate information. High school can, at times, feel like a rat race in which everyone over-commits themselves in order to get into their desired college. This year especially I have seen many of my classmates gain early exposure to this kind of ratty lifestyle, with junior year, in a nutshell, being a chemistry test tomorrow, an AP lang essay due yesterday, an APUSH quiz in ten minutes, an away game after school, and four hours of homework to start at 9 pm. The fight in this scenario is not for wealth, but the finish line of graduation and the looming question of "What Next?" Whoever can operate on the least sleep wins! (seriously though, you guys need to get more sleep). It seems that my fellow students already buy into the rat race, with junior Colby Ting recently interrupting our focused math work, theorizing “I bet you could make a lot of money racing rats.”
One may argue that if rats can maintain this unmaintainable lifestyle, we should be able to as well. However, my careful studying of ratbehavior.org has shown that THIS IS A LIE. Although young rats “play intensely with each other," chasing and jumping on their littermates, this is strictly “play fighting” and not real fighting, unlike humans who fight for tangible desires; when rats compete they fight for the fun of it, quickly making up and forgetting the fight ever occurred. According to ratbehavior.org, there is significant evidence of food sharing in rats, and rats are known to “share food when they smell hunger."
This highlights the hypocrisy of the ‘rat race:' we claim to follow the lead of these furry creatures, but we don’t actually listen to them.
Instead of getting sucked into a competitive struggle with our peers, both at YHS and throughout the country, we should follow the lead of the rats: share food when we smell hunger.
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