2: Level 1: The Hamster Wheel

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

― Rosa Luxemburg

What scares me the most isn’t the unknown. It’s the thought of falling back into the known - the routine, the daily reminder that I’ll never escape the hamster wheel but will always be horribly aware of its existence. Do you know the story of Hannah the hamster? Likely not, as I haven’t told it to you yet. Well, it goes something like this.

Hannah the hamster is a tortured soul. This wasn’t always the case, but as things go, there was that one fateful day that changed everything. That day started out like any other - waking up, some aimless wandering back and forth, a little food and then she was off to her wheel to burn herself out. She hopped on and starting running. “This is great, I’m being so productive!”, she thought. She kept at it for hours thinking she was really getting somewhere. And this was exactly how she spent her days. Content and blissfully unaware that anything outside of her cage and beloved wheel even existed.

Finally she tripped and fumbled a little bit which caused her to stop and look around. For whatever reason, this fall opened her eyes to things she had never really seen... She was still in her cage. All the work she did and she was still in the exact place she started. It suddenly hit her that no matter how much or how hard she ran, she never actually went anywhere. She looked up at the wheel and was horribly confused. She felt this need for it, because well, what would she do without it? But then she also wondered why she actually needed it if it wasn’t getting her where she wanted to go, let alone anywhere at all.

Hannah then slumped back against the wheel as her confusion turned into anger and then depression and finally apathy. She might have been slumped against that wheel for days by the time she finally snapped out of the haze from the sinking spiral she had fallen into. She had come to terms with the fact that the wheel was a lie, but she also wondered what she was supposed to do now. She didn’t have many options, so she thought that maybe if she tried the wheel again she could somehow forget everything that had consumed her thoughts in the past few days. Hannah jumped on it and started to run and run and run. She tried to block out the thoughts, but the more she ran the more she felt the wheel taunting her. She came to a dead stop and suddenly realized that she needed a plan - an escape plan. Hannah knew she had to beat the dreaded hamster wheel - no matter what. She had to find out what was out there. So, she started plotting…

Yeah okay, sure, Hannah is a hamster and that was just a story, but think about it… are any of us that much different? We get up everyday and more or less do exactly what we did the day before. We accept our reality for what it is and while we might not like or enjoy the bulk of it, we continue to go along with it. Because well, what the hell else are we supposed to do? This life of ours is built upon convention and routine and we all seem to fall into it just because it’s the way we’ve been taught. Now, don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying that convention and routine are bad things. They, just like everything else, have a time and place and ultimately serve some purpose in life. Beyond that, some people are really able to thrive when their life is built on such ideas.

I however, am not one of those people. The thought of going through the same routines everyday for the rest of any amount of time is beyond dreadful. It feels like a 3 ton weight pulling me further and further into this vast darkness. It feels like doom and gloom. It feels like waking up and realizing that you’re just a hamster trapped in a cage (or a rat if you’re Billy Corgan) and no matter how hard or fast you run, you’re never actually going to go anywhere. And this my friends, has been one of my life-long struggles.

So, that brings me to the question of the hour, week and maybe even year… how does someone who doesn’t play well with the standard conventional life find a way to live happily in a world that demands convention? I wish I knew. God, how I’ve wished a bolt of lightning would come down from the sky and strike me with that magical ah-ha moment I’ve been after for as long as I can remember. And oh, how I’m envious of those people that have always had some grand life plan. That have felt a calling for something so strong that they’ve never had a doubt about the way their life was supposed to work - or at least the way they wanted their life to work. Yeah, I know, these people are likely a rare species, but seriously… to have that feeling of certainty in life, is completely envy-inspiring.  That said, regardless of how certain any of us are about anything at all, we all struggle with something in life. We might have clarity and perfection in some areas of our lives, yet be complete and total disasters when it comes to other areas. Unless of course you’re some super human who is amazing at everything. Then seriously, we all hate you - so I guess at the very least, you have that to deal with.

I saw this cartoon once that showed a crowd of people all walking around with tiny thought bubbles over their heads that all went to one collective bubble and had the text - “All these people really seem to have it together, and I still have no idea what’s going on”. It was a simple cartoon that beautifully illustrated the human condition and our collective problem of always thinking that we are the only person in the world screwing things up while everyone else has everything figured out. Let me tell you something about that - we are all confused. Seriously. I don’t care how together anyone seems, at the end of the day there is still something that keeps them awake at night, that tortures their thoughts, that makes them feel inadequate or incapable. We all have something that eats at us - I promise.

I feel like I’ve potentially jumped from one point to another with all of this and some of it might seem like it’s unrelated. However, as far as my brain and the way things are connected in there go, everything I’ve told you today is linked together by the same theme - struggle. While I’m not going to wander down the path of philosophical ramblings on this concept, (at least not today, anyway) I am going to ask you to put that concept and everything I’ve told you in the context of your own life. And with that, I’ll leave you for now.