I Resign from the Human Rat Race

Dear Human Rat Race,
I resign from you. You have become a way of life, sucking us in with promises of fame and fortune if we somehow manage to be the elusive number one. That winning this race will magically make us happy; this is not the case at all. If anything you make us miserable, because in this race, there are no winners.
I resign from the competitiveness that parents breed in their children. The parents that accept nothing less than an A and that push their children so hard to be number one. A way of life that makes children so desperate to achieve, that they resort to cheating to get the grade and sabotaging their friends so that they can be number one.
I want nothing to do with a race that encourages underhanded behavior with phrases like “It’s a dog eat dog world”. Somehow justifying the terrible behavior of people because that is what people have to do nowadays to get ahead of the rest of the pack. I do not want to be part of a world, in which a person would only consider helping someone else if it is beneficial to him in some way.
I do not want the so-called successful life that everyone is striving to achieve these days, the big house, the nice car and the perfect smart children. To achieve this, the parent’s life is taken over by work in an effort to earn enough money to send their children to the best school, to receive the best education. However, in the process they miss out on the milestones of that child’s life. Their first step, their first word, their school plays. The parent-child relationship slowly deteriorates into resentment. The child resents the parent for never being there and ‘abandoning’ them to nannies, while the parent resents the child’s ungratefulness. Family dinners are shorter or non-existent, with each party rushing off to do something more important, like a conference call or schoolwork. These bitter children however grow up to unwittingly follow in their parent’s foot steps. They push their own children hard in school. Their lives are taken over by work to provide for their children because they do not want to be labeled bad parents. Because in today’s society anything less would be considered bad parenting.
Human rat race, you are a vicious cycle, and I want nothing to do with you. So I quit, because I want to experience the truly important things in life, and as long as I am a participant in this rat race, this is not possible. I refuse to be added to your list of stolen souls which are trapped in the false hope that you offer people, the ones that trying to obtain empty happiness.
No! I will not have my moments stolen from me! You may have managed to steal some of them, when I was naïve and fell for the whole successful life. But now I’ve learned and I frankly see no point in continuing on this hopeless race.

Alicia