Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race

We need the rat race because we’re biologically wired to move forward,” says Buchholz, “not to sit around like a poached egg on toast. It’s a revolutionary. It seems that running around is good for us, it makes us younger, smarter, stronger, happier and more successful.

He started to write a book to condemn competition, as we see it. At the beginning looking at all the attempts people do to become outstanding, he felt that may be this made them feel miserable.

Then the researches, consisted on neuroscience, psychology, and economics. He realized he had wrong, because this is the competition , it is the striving, that gives us the best sense of happiness .

People, who just relax and step back these are the ones truly miserable. It is the race, it is the desire to learn new knowledge, to make money , to achieve new posts, that actually releases dopamine and gives us the rush. This behavior is noted, since we are kids…if you give everybody a trophe , this doesn’t really make sense, because this doesn’t avoid competition but makes possible the cynicism. Normally people need competition for improvement, and novelty. Competition is necessary for the companies.

Our body and our mind are made for work , we are made for activity-says the author. And, believe that if one would take something for granted, it wouldn’t have the same value and importance for him ,as if he had worked hard to achieve the same. We need to have reward for our work and fatigue , and in competition market this reward would be success, or earnings , or new clients. I see it as a cycle, where the member feed each other…so …the completion needs new things and improvement, this way peole have to work hard to innovate. This keeps them running and gives them feed back and satisfaction. Imagine the opposite, just staying all the day , without anything new to discover, or to meet or even a problem to solve…that would be boring. So , I do agree when the authors says were meant to do activity.

This reminds me the statement of the C.E.O of the American Hospital who said that the most terrifying thing for me is to get up one morning and to have not a to do list.