rat race

noun

, Informal.

1. any exhausting, unremitting, and usually competitive activity or routine, especially a pressured urban working life spent trying to get ahead with little time left for leisure, contemplation, etc.

rat race

noun

1. a continual routine of hectic competitive activity

   working in the City is a real rat race

Word History and Origins

Origin of rat race¹

An Americanism dating back to 1935–40

Idioms and Phrases

Fierce competition to maintain or improve one's position in the workplace or social life. For example, You may not realize what a rat race it is to get research grants . This term presumably alludes to the rat's desperate struggle for survival. [ Colloquial ; first half of 1900s]

Example Sentences

For a long time, burnout was seen as the worker’s problem—something they needed to fix with self-care and yoga and sleep if they were going to make it in the rat race of life.

From Time

Some young people are also adopting passive forms of resistance to what increasingly seems like an unwinnable rat race, such as the “lying flat” philosophy, essentially opting out and doing the bare minimum.

From Quartz

This strip of sand, home to a smattering of cabins and shacks, is the perfect spot for those easing their way back into the rat race of modern life.

From Ozy

It just felt like a rat race in these classes to memorize these procedures, these formulas.

From Washington Post

Once they traded away Harden, Houston withdrew from that rat race.

From FiveThirtyEight

The Daily Pic: James Nares slows Manhattan's rat race to a snail's pace.

From The Daily Beast

To stay, and attempt to make the cartel rat-race over, sweetly and rationally so that no one would be hurt?

From Project Gutenberg

They suffered the ever-present agitation of envy, the constant comparison to one's superiors, the plagued rat race.

From Project Gutenberg

But under torment of insomnia the many selves of the mind may abandon the congress of reason and start a rat-race.

From Project Gutenberg