Are you a rat running a rat race

Do you curse your manager everytime he passes by you for earning more than you by working less? Do you keep on waiting for the calendar to change for the next month for your account to get incremented by a fixed number.. well almost fixed after that appraisal period too. Do you regret why you joined this damn company and while others of your batch have moved ahead and you are left behind. Do you close your eyes every night after a day full of reading emails and chatting and working for the 10% of the time you are paid for. And then again get up in the morning to rush against the snarling traffic towards your office. Well my dear you show every symptom of a rat running a rat race.
And the only way out is to move out of the race coz the tragedy of rat race is even if you win you still remain in the rat race. Sorry for using the cliché but that’s true.
Moving out of the rat race doesn’t necessarily mean quitting the job. Moving out means detachment from the web of the daily chores & excessive involvement in mundane tasks. But staying focused towards your duties and responsibilities. Very much like Krishna preaches in Bhagwad Gita- ‘Stay like a lotus petal in pond.. wet yet dry. Involved yet detached.’

I know it’s not as simple as it sounds but let’s first understand the problem.The problem arises when you start comparing yourself with others and succumb to peer pressure. You always like to reach to the other person’s position(obviously if he’s at a higher level) by just looking at the face value of his position and ignoring your strengths and weaknesses. You always want to be appreciated by others, approved by others. You have always believed that the better people feel about you, the better you can feel about yourself. However, you may have never really considered that the opposite of this belief must hold equally and unhappily true, and that is: The less you are approved by others, the more alone and uncertain you feel. This helps to explain why you think you have to please people as well as why you resent those you feel you must please. Being approved by others has become a strange kind of life-support system wherein, after a lifetime of depending on it, you unconsciously believe that there won't be life without someone there to approve you into existence. Just the opposite is true. The more you depend on others to confirm you to yourself, the less real life you have of your own.
It is our fear of being alone and in doubt, of wanting to feel certain that what we are doing is right, that compels us to seek the approval of others. So this tells us that the chief cause of why our lives so often wind up in the hands of others is not that they are superior or that the world is too strong for us, but that we don't want to face the uncertainty and aloneness that we think we are too weak to bear. This is the real cause of all of our wrong relationships in life: We have been betrayed by a belief in our own weakness. And unless we overcome ourselves we’ll continue to find ourselves in the rat race- running towards an unknown goal.

The conscious refusal to go along with your weakness is what invokes and finally delivers real inner-strength. This new kind of strength gradually becomes the cornerstone of a true individual existence -- the life you've always wanted. This may sound philosophical. The stakes are actually eternal -- but self-victory is as certain as the fact that light always triumphs over darkness. If you will stay in the middle of this struggle for true self-possession, not asserting your individuality but allowing it to flourish and to blossom -- bearing what you must bear by refusing to submit yourself to negative, self-betraying influences -- you will come to know the highest approval that Life can award. You won't be jealous of anyone coz you know you'll definitely get what you deserve. Reality itself will approve you. And when it does, all of your struggles (and races) will become a thing of the past. You will possess yourself. No one around you will suspect that you now live in a new kind of bright inner-world; a world that is always on your terms because your terms and the terms of this happy new inner-world are never in conflict. You have won the race. You have won your own life.