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The Fulcrum in the see-saw of your life : when your first life truly begins…

The Fulcrum in the see-saw of your life : when your first life truly begins…

by | Nov 6, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Life, Peace, Zen

We are told: “We have two lives. The second begins when we realize we have only one.”

The sooner we realise, our first and only life is going to be lived as it could be lived... For many that realisation comes very close to their end. Though, some philosophers say we are all born equal. I beg to differ. We are born unequal... Some with silver spoon in their mouth, some golden ones and some no spoons at all... Many of us have to struggle and suffer a lot more than others... But in Death more or less we are equal. At the end of it all, it is 6 ft of earth or a handful of ashes.

A long time back, I worked as an Org change and transformation consultant at KAUST Thuwal, Jeddah... Btw full name of KAUST is King Abdulla University of Science and Technology... It is apt to say, it is more of a modern showcase monument than a university. Started by the King of Saudi Arabia in his name and well-funded by Aramco, it is said to be the second richest university in the world after Harvard, in endowment holding. That riches and opulence was there everywhere. I don’t know which other university in the world has its own harbour, lighthouse and a long beach that too facing the verdant Red Sea... And inside, all of us had the big screen Macs in addition to the latest and top most versions of MacBook Pros...

One of the humorous anecdotes I heard there was about its inauguration... It was shared by many. So I reckon it as true. It so seems, during the inauguration, many a times, King Abdulla happened to hear the word KAUST... and he summoned the Aramco sr. exec, who was also the de facto “RULER” of the university to clarify. And that exec replied it stands for King Abdulla University of Science and Technology. It is said, the king got into rage, how dare you shorten my name like that... Better you change it or you had it... And the very next day, they put up the name board in full...

And King Abdulla did pass away, when I was still working there. To my surprise, he was buried in an unmarked grave. This is in accordance with the austere Islamic tradition of Wahhabism, which opposes public displays of wealth and mourning to emphasize equality before God. His grave is located in the Al Oud cemetery in Riyadh and is marked with a simple, plain stone.

So I thought, at the end of the day, death makes us equal in one way or other. Though there was a Shah Jahan who built at a great cost and cruelly a mausoleum and modern day Shah Jahans do that, most of us don’t get there. Though there can smell a bit of inequality there, there is another aspect of death, where we are absolutely equal. No one. Absolutely no one can predict the time of leaving. You can be a prince or pauper. If Alexander had to leave behind all the kingdoms he conquered at an early age, that points to just that.

And here, the philosophers join in like a chorus. Seneca reminds us that the problem is not that life is short, but that we waste much of it. His words sting, because they are true—we squander hours, days, years, as if they were endless. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor who wrote to himself in the quiet of his tent, whispers: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” His is not a lofty abstraction but a practical tool, a way to live with integrity now, not later. And then Tagore, with the gentleness of a poet, offers another measure altogether: “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” A life is not weighed in years but in the intensity of its moments, in the beauty of its flight.

Albert Camus, who wrote of the absurdity of existence, died suddenly in a car crash, with an unused train ticket in his pocket. That unused ticket is the perfect symbol of all our plans, our “later,” being rendered null by the absurd randomness of fate. His death is the brutal proof of what the philosophers intuited: that the second life cannot be postponed.

And so we return to the fulcrum. We often assume our first life begins with a cry in a delivery room. But is that truly the start? For decades, we may only be inheriting a life—a script written by others, a path laid down by circumstance, a collection of expectations and conditioned responses. We accumulate a name, a history, a personality, a set of possessions. But is the person living this existence truly awake, or are they a custodian of a pre‑fabricated self?

Life is a see‑saw, the fulcrum never quite in the middle. Sometimes the shorter side sinks, not because of weight, but because of where awareness rests.

This inherited existence—the one of silver spoons or none, of struggle and societal metrics—is the prelude. It is the raw material, the long, often‑unbalanced side of the see‑saw weighted with the past. It is a reaction, not a creation.

Your first life begins at the fulcrum.

It begins not when you are born to the world, but when the world is born to you. It starts in the silent, seismic shock of realization—the same one that marks the beginning of the so‑called “second life.” This is the paradox: your first life and your second life are the same life, born in the same instant.

The moment you realize you have only one life is the moment you become truly alive within it. It is the moment you shift from being a passenger to the driver, from a custodian to the author. The fulcrum point is where unconscious inheritance ends and conscious living begins.

Before the fulcrum, you had a biography. After the fulcrum, you have a story you are actively writing.

So, when does your first life begin?

It begins when you trade Seneca’s “waste” for Aurelius’s “purpose.” It begins when you stop counting months like a mortal and start counting moments like Tagore’s butterfly. It begins when the nightmare of the unmarked grave no longer frightens you, but focuses you on the vibrant, fragile ordinariness of the now.

Your first life begins when you choose to place the fulcrum of your awareness in the present and finally, deliberately, begin to balance the weight of all you have been with the possibility of all you might yet be.

Author’s Note These reflections came up during a memorial service for All Souls’ Day 2 November, observed at Kanzeon Zendo. The names of the departed, the scent of incense, and the silence between thoughts were the first drafts of this chronicle. This is the day the veil between the living and the dead is considered thinnest. And so, behind this thin veil, Camus and Alexander, King Abdullah and Karen, Ann Marie and Sheela, and my late father, Sankara—all find their place on the same altar of remembrance, embodying the very equality I sought to describe.

And perhaps the altar itself is a see‑saw of memory and presence: the weight of absence pressing one side down, the lightness of gratitude lifting the other.

 

Vanaprastha for Our Times: On Burnout, Busyness, and the Third Path

Vanaprastha for Our Times: On Burnout, Busyness, and the Third Path

by | Oct 12, 2025 | Career, Change, Harmony, Joy, Life, Peace, STRESS, Transformation, Zen

When M@@@@Lee first arrived at our zendo, I was struck by his quiet discipline. Middle‑aged, yet carrying the vitality of someone twenty years younger, he never missed a single zazen session. He spoke little, preferring to rest his gaze on forests, hills, and waterfalls rather than books. Only later did I learn of his past: 18 years in the United States as a chartered accountant, often working eighteen‑hour days in investment banks, living in luxury until burnout forced a reckoning.

For the last One and half decades, he has lived like a nomad, frugal and free. He speaks of happiness and contentment not as achievements, but as discoveries. His story is a living commentary on Byung‑Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. Han, another son of Korea, describes how the achievement society—with its relentless drive to optimize, perform, and succeed—leads not to freedom but to exhaustion. He contrasts deep attention, the contemplative focus that gave rise to philosophy and art, with hyperattention, the restless scattering of the mind across endless stimuli. In losing boredom and silence, Han warns, we lose the very conditions for renewal.

Lee embodies the medicine Han prescribes. His burnout was the breaking point Han diagnoses. His nomadic simplicity is the refusal of the achievement society. His steady zazen restores the deep attention Han says we have lost. His gaze on forests and waterfalls is a return to what Han calls the contemplative dwelling that modernity has abandoned.

And then there is Gopal, a respected corporate leader who recently reflected on his own transition into retirement. Quoting his father, he wrote: “To catch a train that has already started, you may have to run alongside it before jumping in.” It is a wise metaphor for transitions, yet it also reveals the subtle compulsion many of us feel—to keep running, to keep filling life with activity, even when the train we are chasing may not be ours to board.

In observing these two paths—Lee's and Gopal's—we see a fundamental dichotomy in how we face life's transitions. On one end lies the person who is totally burnt out... On the other, the person who, even after a great innings...

So it is safe to assume there are two kinds of people out there. The exhausted renouncer and the restless achiever. One who feels totally burnt out and want nothing to do with it. For him, emptying his mind about anything about it is what makes the rest of his life worthwhile. While the other, after a great innings and having done brilliantly well in his chosen profession, still is eager to jump into the next train of achievement. After reaching the top of the pyramid, why the eagerness, why the worry about the next phase of productivity? Monetary considerations of worry about a lesser lifestyle may not be the reasons. If one is intended to use their great expertise and knowledge of serving the mankind for the rest of their life after a great fist innings, may not get that wary about what s/he will be doing with their time. Being not comfortable about not being in limelight, could be one. Or maybe it is due to the worry about how to be with the void /emptiness in their life.

Even if  they worry about the next innings for none of the above mentioned reasons and it is just for timepass, when we call it timepass—scrolling reels, flipping channels, or filling the calendar with trivialities—it is rarely innocent. Beneath the surface lies the same movement: the fear of the void.

We are uneasy with silence, with the space where applause fades and identity loosens. So we keep ourselves busy, not because the activity nourishes us, but because it shields us from emptiness.

But as Krishnamurti reminds us, emptiness is not a defect to be patched over. It is a doorway. When we stop trying to fill it, the void reveals itself as fullness—alive with creativity, compassion, and presence.

The real courage is not in passing time, but in letting time pass through us, unresisted.

Here, Pascal’s old warning rings true: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Whether it is the youth endlessly scrolling through reels, the middle‑ager flipping through channels, or the retiree rushing to fill the calendar, the root is the same: our discomfort with stillness.

Krishnamurti went even deeper. He observed that as long as the mind is seeking to fill its emptiness, it will remain empty. We try to fill the void with activity, possessions, relationships, or applause, but this only perpetuates the sense of lack. He wrote: “As long as the mind is seeking to fill itself, it will always be empty. When the mind is no longer concerned with filling its own emptiness, then only does that emptiness cease to be.”

For Krishnamurti, emptiness is not a defect to be patched over, but a doorway. “In emptiness alone can there be creation,” he said. When the mind stops running, stops filling, stops chasing trains, it discovers a silence that is not absence but presence. From that silence, something new can be born—innocence, creativity, compassion.

This is the crucial distinction:

  • To fill hunger is natural, necessary, life‑sustaining.
  • To fill psychological emptiness is endless, and often destructive.

When activity arises from genuine need or from the joy of service, it nourishes. When it arises from fear of silence or the craving for applause, it drains.

Zen would call this the great death of the striving self. And in that death, a new life appears—one that needs little, yet feels complete.

In the ancient Indian worldview, Vānaprastha—the stage of “going to the forest”—was not only for ordinary householders but also for kings and emperors, who were expected to renounce power and wealth at their peak and turn toward contemplation. King Bharata, after whom Bhārat (India) is named, is one of the most striking examples: he gave up his throne and retreated into the forest to seek liberation.

Today, the forest may not be a literal place, but a state of mind—an inner withdrawal from applause and limelight into presence.

Between the exhausted renouncer and the restless achiever, there are a few rare ones who discover meaning early and live it seamlessly until their last breath. For them, life is not about applause or limelight, nor about withdrawal in exhaustion. Their work itself is their prayer, their service, their offering.

Saba Naqvi once wrote of Mallikarjun Mansur, the saintly Hindustani vocalist from Dharwar. Stricken with lung cancer, doctors had given up. His daughter was told not to deny him the things he loved most. In his final moments, he asked for a bidi, and as he drew on it, he was still humming Raga Jogiya, almost inaudibly. With the raga on his lips, his head rolled over, and he was gone. His art was his final breath.

Another story is told of Abdul Karim Khan, founder of the Kirana gharana. On his way to Puducherry to sing for Sri Aurobindo, he sensed his end was near. He stepped off the train at an unknown station, spread out his prayer mat, and sang his last song. He died there on the platform. He did not board the next train of achievement—he stepped off, to let music itself carry him across.

And I see the same spirit in my own Zen master, Fr. AMA Samy. At ninety, he still sends emails at 3:30 a.m. with reflections, still walks into the zendo for early morning meditation. His life is not about filling time or clinging to relevance. It is about continuity of presence, a rhythm of practice that does not retire.

These lives remind us that there is a third path: not renunciation in exhaustion, not striving for the next platform, but a life so deeply rooted in one’s calling that even the final breath is an act of practice, art, or service. For them, there is only one train—the train to eternity.

In the end, whether we are young and restless, middle‑aged and distracted, or retired and still wary of leaving the limelight, the invitation is the same: to stop running, to stop filling, to sit still. The rishis called it Vānaprastha. Han calls it deep attention. Pascal calls it the courage to sit quietly. Krishnamurti calls it the doorway of emptiness. Zen calls it the great death of the striving self. Many names, one truth: the train we most need to catch is not out there on the tracks—it is already here, in the stillness of this very moment.

The Window and the Wall: When the World Is the Storyteller

The Window and the Wall: When the World Is the Storyteller

by | Sep 23, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Peace, Zen

Have you read that story title the "The Window" ? "In that hospital story, two men share a room. One’s bed is next to the window; the other is confined to his bed away from it. Each day, the man by the window vividly describes what he sees — children playing, lovers strolling, swans gliding on a lake, the beauty of changing seasons. His words become the other patient’s lifeline, lifting his spirits and giving him something to look forward to. One day, the man by the window dies. When the surviving patient asks to be moved to the window, he discovers that the “view” is actually a blank wall. The scenes had all been imagined — a gift of hope and beauty from one human being to another."  

Now, at Kanzeon Zendo, I write in a room without windows, where the sky itself is the roof and the mountains stand as steadfast walls. Here, there is no need to invent and imagine the view — the horizon is already an open page, and the still mind rolls on like the wheel. What was once a story of vision born in absence becomes, in this boundless chamber, vision born in presence. The same generosity of spirit flows, but now the world itself is the storyteller.

When the mind frees itself from the shackles and botheration of likes, reposts, eyeballs, and LinkedIn’s restless algorithms, it settles into stillness. In that quiet, there is no striving, no audience to please — only the open space where the pen moves of its own accord, writing what needs to be written.

And in the same moment, seeds of ideas are sown, sprouts are tended, branches are pruned, and the harvest is gathered — the entire cycle of creation unfolding in a single breath.

And that is the gist of Zen teacher Natalie Goldberg’s. “Writing to the bones, freeing the writer within. “.  

All the modern wants and greed  dictated by the social media are really shackles.  Only when one becomes aware of it, only then the writer within frees himself.   Almost all the great literary works , they wrote for themselves.

Every writer must choose where they sit: by the imagined window, in the room with a view, or beneath the sky‑roof with mountain walls. The choice is never about scenery, but about freedom. Free yourself from the shackles of metrics, and the work will grow — seed to sprout, branch to harvest — without needing permission from the world.

The window is a wall. The wall is a window. The horizon is neither. When the mind stops looking for a view, the view appears. When the pen stops trying to write, the writing is already done.

Half‑Way Up the Mountain: Heights, Depths, and the Twilight Way

Half‑Way Up the Mountain: Heights, Depths, and the Twilight Way

by | Sep 13, 2025 | Change, Harmony, Joy, Meditation, STRESS, Zen

 

John Moriarty  wrote in Dreamtime :

"It is like setting up a ladder against a rock wall by a lake. The lake mirrors your ascent as a descent. And so, thinking that I was ready for the Heights when I wasn’t simultaneously ready for the depths, that was my catastrophe, that was the avalanche I set off, looking ever upwards, on the Mount of Perfection. It carried me down into a Deep below all depths."

And C.G. Jung, put that in better psychological perspective :

"Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light."

Two voices, two views— yet they meet in the same archetypal truth: the vertical axis of human experience is not one‑way. Every genuine ascent carries its shadow‑descent, and every plunge into darkness contains the seed of a corresponding light.

Mariana Kaplan, in her Halfway Up the Mountain  wrote of false claims to attainment. But the phrase reaches further than the problem of fake gurus and faker anti gurus and everyone else in between— it speaks to all of us. We are always, in some sense, halfway up the mountain. The summit is not a fixed point of eternal bliss, as some traditions promise. As we climb, the mountain itself rises.

The Greek philosopher Zeno hinted at this in his paradox: each time we move toward our goal, we can only cover half the remaining distance. Theoretically, we never arrive. The closer we get, the more the horizon recedes.

Buddhist teaching offers a similar lens: everything in this universe — you, me, the tree outside, the big rock near the Kanzeon Zendo waterfall, the distant mountain, the drifting clouds — is a process, not a finished product. There is no final arrival. The moment of arrival is already a moment of departure. In truth, we are always at the twilight of arriving and leaving, like the early morning and evening when sun and moon share the same sky.

And here, the metaphor meets the science: twilight is not when the Sun “shines most.” In fact, the Sun is below the horizon, its light reaching us only indirectly, scattered through the upper atmosphere. It is a softer, more diffused light — the “blue hour” photographers love — neither the full blaze of midday nor the darkness of night. This is why twilight is such a fitting image for the spiritual path: it is a time of transition, of partial illumination, of seeing enough to walk on, but never so much that all shadows vanish.

Many mistake spiritual progress for a straight, one‑way road. We imagine it as a steady climb, step after step, always forward. But the lived truth is far less linear. Sometimes it is one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back. The rhythm is irregular, the pace unpredictable.

When we trudge toward the light, we do not leave the darkness behind; we carry it with us. The shadow is not an obstacle we “overcome” once and for all — it is a companion, a counterweight, a reminder. Light and shadow are not separate territories but a continuous spectrum, each shading into the other.

The movement is often like a pendulum swinging toward the light. But unlike a physical pendulum, the swing is not symmetric. The arc toward illumination may be long and slow, the return into shadow sudden and steep — or the reverse. The asymmetry is part of the work.

Dr. Kaustav Roy taught us phenomenology at APU, and one of the books he insisted we must read was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience. That book held a distilled essence of human nature — a wisdom phrase to cherish in almost every paragraph. But one quote that stayed with me is:

“A good man is aware of what is not good in him, while a bad man is not.”

Awareness of the shadow is not a flaw in the journey; it is the journey. To see what is not yet whole in us is already to stand in the light. To deny it is to remain in darkness, even if our words and gestures point upward.

Moriarty’s mirrored ladder and Jung’s law of correspondence remind us that readiness for the heights is inseparable from readiness for the depths. To prepare for one without the other is to court collapse. The avalanche Moriarty speaks of is not a moral failure; it is the psyche’s way of restoring symmetry.

And so, halfway up the mountain is not a place of shame — it is the only place there is. The climb is endless, the summit ever‑rising, the path a dance between ascent and descent, light and shadow, arrival and departure. The measure of progress is not how far we have climbed, but how honestly we can stand in both light and darkness, in both coming and going, without losing our balance.

Perhaps this is why the old traditions speak of Great Doubt alongside Great Faith. The lake and the ladder, the light and the darkness, the ascent and the descent, the dawn and the dusk — they are not two journeys, but one.

In the end, the Way is not about reaching the top, nor about avoiding the fall. It is about walking with the mountain as it rises beneath our feet, with the lake reflecting both our ascent and our descent, with the twilight sky holding both sun and moon. Arrival and departure are the same step.

And in that step, the journey is complete — even as it begins again.

 

 

Rampway to Heaven… or Just Another Day in Paradise?

Rampway to Heaven… or Just Another Day in Paradise?

by | Sep 12, 2025 | Compassion, Harmony, Joy, Zen

Here at Kanzeon Zendo, a rampway rises gently from the meditation hall to nowhere— a small, earthly path that somehow feels like it could lead to heaven itself.

“Stairway to Heaven” is one of the few rock songs I’ve listened to many times. Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin released that album when I was just six days old in this world. It still carries some of the most hauntingly beautiful lines in rock:

“There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven

When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for

Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a stairway to Heaven

There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings

In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven”

Robert Plant’s lyrics have been read as a meditation on choice, illusion, and the search for something beyond the material. Jimmy Page, who co-wrote it, once admitted to altered states in those days — but even without them, the song’s imagery opens a door to other ways of seeing.

And yet, I find myself drawn just as much to Phil Collins’ refrain:

“It’s just another day for you and me in paradise.”

Chasing Cheese While Seeking Space: Are You the Last Rat in the Maze?

Chasing Cheese While Seeking Space: Are You the Last Rat in the Maze?

by | Sep 11, 2025 | Change, Harmony, Meditation, Peace, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

In the hush before dawn, the world is a maze without walls.
Some run, chasing the scent of cheese.
Some pause, listening for the sound of their own breath.
The path is the same, yet the journey is different.
Freedom is not in leaving the maze,
but in seeing it for what it is.

Kanzeon Zendo opened its doors on 22 December 2022. From January 2023 onwards, I began spending time here — thanks to my then boss, coach and mentor, Robert Meir. In those early months, my life was split evenly: fifteen days at the Zendo, fifteen days at home in Bengaluru. By December 2024, I had moved here fully, travelling back to Bengaluru for a week each month so I could be in the office for a day or two. Then, on 15 May, I left my job — or perhaps the job left me — and since then I’ve been here almost full‑time.

Through all these shifts, one refrain kept coming from friends, family, and coachees: “Good for you. At last you are out of the rat race.” At times I tried to explain that no one is truly free in this phenomenal life — the context and scenery may change, but in some way we are all still rats on the same ship. After being on the receiving end of a pay slip for some three decades, it is not easy to live with five or six thousand INR as your pension. Though, Fr AMA does provide me with the basic needs of life — food, shelter, medicines, and spiritual guidance. My words rarely landed. Yet the phrase “rat race” stuck with me. Why, I wondered, is the way modern humans live named after rats — of all animals?

I think, for more than a century, rats have been the quiet partners in our quest to understand ourselves. They are not just convenient lab animals; they are close cousins in biology and behaviour. Around ninety percent of our genes are the same. Their brains are built on the same blueprint as ours, with a cortex, hippocampus, and limbic system that process memory, learning, and emotion in ways strikingly similar to human minds. They live in social groups, form hierarchies, cooperate, compete, and even show empathy. They respond to stress, isolation, and reward much as we do. In the lab, they become mirrors — small enough to study, close enough to reveal truths about our own nature.

Perhaps that’s why rats have slipped so easily into our language as metaphors for human life. We talk about the “rat race” when we feel trapped in endless competition. We “smell a rat” when something feels off. A “pack rat” hoards possessions; to “rat on” someone is to betray them. We speak of “rats leaving a sinking ship” when people abandon a failing cause, and call ourselves “lab rats” when we feel like test subjects in someone else’s experiment. These phrases endure because they capture something raw and familiar: our instinct to survive, adapt, and sometimes, to scramble without asking why.

One story, often told in the spirit of B.F. Skinner’s work ( From Richard Bandler and John Grinder book "Frogs into Princes"), makes the point with a wry twist. Researchers trained rats to run a maze for cheese, and humans to run a scaled-up maze for five-dollar bills. Both learned quickly. Then the rewards were removed. The rats, after a few unrewarded runs, stopped. The humans kept going. Some even “broke in at night” to check if the money had returned. Whether or not this experiment happened exactly as told, the allegory is clear: we often persist in old patterns long after the reward is gone, driven by habit, sunk costs, or the hope that maybe this time will be different.

In the 1960s, ethologist John B. Calhoun built what he called Universe 25 — a rodent utopia with unlimited food, water, and nesting space. At first, the population boomed. But as crowd increased, social order broke down. Mothers neglected their young, aggression spiked, some withdrew entirely. Eventually, reproduction ceased and the colony collapsed. Calhoun called it the “behavioural sink” — a collapse of social functioning under crowding. It was a haunting image, and many took it as a warning about human cities. But density alone may not be the culprit. Bees live in extreme closeness — tens of thousands in a hive — yet thrive. Ants, termites,  elephants, wolves, dolphins  all live in tight social groups without imploding. The difference is that their societies are hard‑wired: every member has a defined role, communication is constant, numbers are regulated, and the survival of the group outweighs individual competition.

Humans are different. We are not locked into fixed roles by instinct. Our prefrontal cortex — the seat of planning, self‑control, and imagination — develops slowly over decades. This frees us from the tyranny of our genes, but it also means our social order is learned to a great extent and  not pre‑programmed. We can reinvent ourselves, but we can also lose our way. To thrive, we need to balance two deep drives: the need for space — physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual breathing room — and the need for cohesion — trust, belonging, and shared purpose.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests we naturally organise into concentric layers, which we can think of as moving from core to tribe. At the centre is your core — about five people you can call at three in the morning, who know your fears, joys, and contradictions. Around them is your close circle of fifteen — the companions who show up when it matters. Beyond that is an affinity group of fifty — the people you’d invite to a big celebration, who know your story and whose stories you know. And finally, your tribe of about one hundred and fifty — the size of a functioning village, where faces are familiar and belonging is real. Beyond that, ties loosen and the emotional intensity fades.

Social media flattens these layers. It floods our inner circles with hundreds or thousands of weak ties, blurring boundaries and overloading our social brain. We end up with crowding without cohesion — a digital behavioural sink. The result can look eerily like Universe 25: withdrawal, aggression, or the emergence of “Beautiful Ones” who appear fine but are socially disengaged.

So, though “rat race” is most often used in the context of our workplaces — or the way we strive to hoard resources, both real and imagined, to secure a comfortable never‑ending, ‘immortal’ life for ourselves and those we love — it has quietly spread its wings into almost every sphere of our lives. This is, in part, because the layers of Dunbar’s circle have thinned, and the people we believe we love — or feel closest to — shift and change with surprising speed. All too often, our movement toward the inner circles, or our drift toward the outer ones, is shaped less by shared life and more by the fleeting currency of likes and applause within our social‑media cocoons. The compulsive, addictive,  reward-chasing behaviour, “RAT RACE”  isn't confined to our jobs; it has infected our social interactions, hobbies, and personal identities (via likes and applause) or even spiritual highways. Many are absolutely  blind to the sad reality that  their mindset can corrupt even their  quest for meaning and enlightenment.

Rats teach us about our instincts. Bees and elephants teach us about structure. Our own brains teach us about choice. The “rat race” isn’t inevitable — but escaping it means knowing when to run the maze, when to rest, and when to ask if the cheese was ever worth chasing. The maze is not the trap. The belief that the reward still exists — that is the trap. And perhaps the real question is not whether you are the last rat in the maze, but whether you still need to be in it at all.

Only when we see the rat race for what it is — a mousetrap in disguise — do we arrive at the real question. The question that really matters. And that question — not the answer — is our first and last step (infact only step) to freedom.

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