Likely Normal

There comes a point in every adult life when you suddenly stop mid-sprint and realize you’re not actually moving forward – you’re just a well-dressed hamster on a corporate wheel, panting furiously while the scenery never changes. We live in an age of unprecedented momentum where everything is evolving at light speed, yet somehow we all feel stuck in place, like characters in a video game running against an invisible wall. Technology reinvents itself every six months, social norms shift overnight, and just when you finally understand the rules of the game, someone changes them and resets the board.

The irony is almost poetic: the harder we work to keep up, the more obvious it becomes that we’re not actually getting anywhere. You spend months mastering a new software platform only for the company to sunset it. You curate the perfect morning routine of meditation, journaling and green smoothies, only to still lose your mind when your phone dies at 20% battery. We chase productivity hacks, life optimization and self-improvement like dogs chasing cars – what would we even do if we caught one? The modern condition is being permanently out of breath from running toward a finish line that keeps moving, while secretly suspecting the race might not even be real.

Somewhere between the third cup of coffee and the fifth notification of some world-changing innovation you don’t understand, it hits you: we’re all fish in a bowl, swimming with tremendous purpose but still bumping into the same glass walls. The apps change, the trends shift, the buzzwords get updated, but fundamentally we’re still the same creatures trying to find meaning in the chaos. Maybe the secret isn’t running faster, but learning to enjoy the absurdity of the exercise. After all, if life is just an elaborate hamster wheel, we might as well decorate it nicely and snack on some premium-grade wood shavings while we spin.

The cosmic joke is that there was never anywhere to actually get to – we were always just here, winded and wide-eyed, realizing too late that the wind can’t be caught… but it does feel nice on your face when you finally stop chasing it. So here’s to running in circles with style, to panting with panache, and to eventually laughing at ourselves when we notice we’ve been making frantic laps in the same three-foot radius this whole time. The wheel isn’t going anywhere – but then again, neither are we. Might as well enjoy the ride.