I was talking to a friend the other night — someone who spent five years in the tech industry before deciding to move into academia. We started out chatting about random things, but at some point, the conversation drifted toward work, purpose, and what it means to spend your life in front of a screen.

He said something that stuck with me:

“Dunno, feels kinda odd to be thinking of going back and working in an office now. What if there’s more to life beyond tech in an office?”

It got me thinking.

We often treat “escaping the rat race” as the ultimate goal — leaving corporate life, rejecting the system, chasing something purer. But maybe every path, even the noble ones, has its own race.

My friend mentioned how life in the lab is slower, but not necessarily freer. Researchers are caught in their own loops — publish or perish, grants, deadlines. It’s just a different kind of pressure. And maybe that’s the point. Even the people we admire — scientists, founders, artists, visionaries — are all in some version of a rat race. Elon Musk and Geoffrey Hinton probably are too.

The difference isn’t in whether you’re running a race.

It’s which race you choose to run.

Maybe the ideal life isn’t about quitting the race altogether, but about exploring them — tech, research, art, teaching, startups — until you find the one that makes you feel alive. The one that challenges you in ways that don’t drain you. The one where the finish line isn’t a paycheck or a publication, but the feeling that you’re building something that might just outlive you.

Because at the end of the day, there’s always a race.

The trick is finding the one you don’t mind running.