Screw the rat race, focus on the VAT race.
Seriously. Stop killing yourself for a race that never ends.
I’ve found that key life changing moments spur on my desire to make big changes to my way of living and a lot of those with the ambition to improve my life in some way. Be it experiencing the death of a close one, getting married or when my son was born, each event created a desire to reassess myself and my decisions.
However, growing up in a world dictated by capitalistic economic and political systems, I’ve been ingrained with this idea that personal progression and value lie with the possessions you own and the money that’s in the bank. Yet, there’s never been a time where owning something or hitting a savings goal has given me nearly the same emotional experience as I’ve gotten from those key life changing moments.
OK yes, getting my hands on a shiny new games console or piece of tech has nearly done it for me, but it wasn’t because of the object, but the emotional experience that would follow.
No, I’m not some hippie nor do I live in a cardboard box. I understand that I live in a world where money ultimately supersedes all else, but why does it have to dictate my world? Why does it need to be what controls the value….
The rat race mentality
Ever more frequently I’ve heard people saying how they need to get out of the ‘rat race’. From chats with my Airbnb hosts and local takeaway owners through to directors of departments in large corporations, the narrative is the same; the grind is what’s getting people down and they want to get out, fast!
A quick Google search of ‘rat race’ brings up this definition:
A way of life in which people are caught up in a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth or power.
Those three words; ‘fiercely competitive struggle’, those are the words that resonated with me the most. Just take a moment and think. When was the last time you fiercely, competitively struggled for something? Was it worth it? For me personally, no it wasn’t. Yes it was something that I did have to persevere for, but why did I let it consume me? Why did I feel the need to let it take priority over so many other facets of my life when in the end it was just a tiny, minuscule blip in my professional life? The rat race mentality had engulfed me, that’s why.
The more I look around and take the time to understand people’s motivations in life the more I see that a lot of decisions are made in the hopes of becoming the bigger stronger rat. Being able to accumulate as much wealth and as many possessions as possible to show that they’re winning at life. So much so that it allows all else to fall by the wayside including their own wants, needs and well being. It’s as though they’ve been conscripted into a race that has no set route, no set finish line and no real reward other than to not have to race again.
Having found myself going down that route I feel the need to course correct. Yes life itself is a similar race. There is no set route, no set finish line, but the reward for running the race — now that can be chosen by me.
Value-Adding Tendencies
We all love a little assonance in a story title and I’m not going to sit here pretending that it was a happy coincidence, but the acronym VAT really does apply here. VAT is:
a tax on the amount by which the value of an article has been increased at each stage of its production or distribution.
VAT is all around us (well, not all of us), but it’s been applied multi-fold to all the items around you, even the device you’re reading this story on right now! But what if we take that definition and try and apply it to our lives? What if at each stage of our lives we do something that adds value and do that religiously just like, I don’t know… a tax? I like to call it Value-Adding Tendencies. Still fits in with the acronym, but means something entirely different.
I now find myself using the following question as my compass before almost every decision and action : is this going to add value to my life in any way? If the answer is yes, then I continue with that and keep asking myself that question and each point in that particular journey until I feel I’ve added as much value as possible and reaped the rewards.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we all should become sad robots consumed by the morbidity of a finite life and try and achieve hyper-efficiency, but rather we should steer towards doing things that we want to do and enhance our experience of our short time on earth. For some, the answer may be to continue down the rat race, but honestly that’s just not for me. I’d rather win at my own VAT race (if that wasn’t clear enough by now).
I really suggest that if you haven’t asked yourself this question recently or ever before, try and do so the next chance you get. Start with asking yourself that once a day and see where that takes you. For me it’s worked great so far.
This entire concept came to me after a couple of months in lockdown due to pandemic, a much hated yet quite poignant TV commercial and a book by a couple of geeks from Silicone Valley. It’s probably not something new, but given we just passed Mental Health Awareness Week 2020 in the UK, I felt I should write about something that has improved my mental health or at least my approach to it.
Each source of inspiration that made up this concept in my mind had a common theme that stood out to me; our time on this planet and more importantly out time with the people we love is finite. It’s fleeting and it’s irreversible. How do I want to spend that time and get the most value from it? Whilst I don’t have a hard answer, I definitely know it’s not spending time being in the rat race.
