Say no to the hamster wheel

You might have seen a hamster wheel. It’s a small circular wire cage that rotates around a central axle, much like a tire rotates around the axle of your car, and inside the cage is an energetic hamster. In our usual image of the hamster, he is running furiously, spinning the wheel at high speed.

From the hamster’s point of view, life inside the wheel may actually appear quite normal. The hamster is an energetic animal by nature, and he’s doing what he knows how to do: run like heck. And he’s making real progress too—he can see the blur of spokes flying by him as he runs.

Unfortunately, his position relative to the ground beneath the cage indicates that he’s actually going nowhere. He’s really just expending lots of ...

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