Lowkey Hellish

I lived with rats once, in a semi-detached on Dupont in Toronto we called the Brohaus. After the City strike in ’09, we took to calling it the Rat Spa for a while. They skittered in the walls at night, sharp little movements clawing away at sleep that was already threadbare. The only solution that felt available back then was to drink myself into a stupor. In those few years I must’ve disposed of half a dozen dead rats myself.

I stayed longer than I should’ve.

I left when I found rat shit in drawers.

I credit those years with teaching me how low I could live before I would go and do something about it. So when I compare us to rats, I’m not doing it as an edgy simile or some schtick. I’m drawing on what I’ve observed. What I’ve lived with.

I didn’t know it then, but I was learning something about survival in systems that don’t care whether you thrive or merely endure. About staying in traps long past the point when you know they’re killing you.

I thought leaving the Brohaus meant leaving the trap.

Instead, I fell into a new one.

The Lie

You can have it all.

That’s the lie you’ve heard your whole life: from apps that promise to save time you don’t have; from managers who mistake exhaustion for ambition; from podcasts selling you someone else’s blueprint; from friends who mean well but don’t see what it costs you.

The pitch is always the same: plan better, track better, optimize harder, and you won’t need to choose. You can be everything to everyone, including yourself.

Fit and well read. Calm and productive. Specialist and generalist. Present parent and ambitious creator.

There’s always a method for that. A course. A template. A newsletter.

You can’t.

Progress Built the Trap

Historically, this trap is new.

For most of human existence, scarcity was our birthright. That changed when agriculture took root 12,000 years ago. James C. Scott argues in Against the Grain that grain fields stay put. Harvests arrive on a schedule. Grain stores well. What stores well becomes taxable. Taxation demands records. Records demand officials. Officials demand enforcement.

Civilization, in this telling, isn’t progress. It’s a running trade. Each fix clears one problem and creates the next. Complexity keeps stacking because it pays off in the short term.

That pattern never stopped.

It earned a new label: Progress.

Calculating Infinity

I know this pattern. It gnawed its way into my brain from a very young age.

I have a mind that wants to fall into novel hyperfixations: rabbit holes that reward me because they interest me, not because they’re tasks that should be done. Rabbit holes that feel urgent enough to justify dropping everything else.

I know that diversifying my interests dilutes my efforts.

And I still do it.

No habit tracker changes the basic math. Limited hours. Limited attention. Limited energy. At some point, you have to choose. Or else you burn out.

When Limits Become Moral Failure

The pressure to do everything has been quietly reframed as a moral failure.

As a kid, you learn limits fast. You cannot eat every snack. You cannot play every game. Later, you hear a different story. Work culture treats limits as a personal flaw. If you fall behind, fix your calendar. If you feel tired, fix your sleep. If you feel scattered, fix your focus.

This story sells because it offers control.

The term for this is technological solutionism: the belief that social and human problems can be solved with design, software, and metrics. What it overlooks is that solutions rarely eliminate problems. Each new solution offers new problems.

A new tool saves time at first. Then it adds upkeep. A new process reduces errors. Then it adds reporting. You end up with more steps and less room to think.

This is the complexity spiral. Each fix generates second-order effects. Over time, the system stops promising satisfaction. It promises momentum.

The Multi-Role Squeeze

I’m not watching this from the sidelines.

I’m a creative. An entrepreneur. A parent. A partner. A son. A father. A husband. A friend. A leader. A student. A neighbour. A teacher. A citizen. Each role arrives with its own invitations, its own emergencies, its own moral claims on my time and attention.

And I keep saying yes when every fibre of my exhausted body is screaming no.

I grow more hands.

One on the book project. One on the podcast. One on the newsletter. One on client work. One on the kids. One on a partnership. One on my own sanity, slipping through my fingers like water.

People see output. They don’t see the unfinished drafts, the stalled projects, the small promises I break to myself. They don’t see the cost that shows up later, in sleep, in mood, in patience.

My life starts to look less like a plan and more like a sequence of stimuli and rewards. And the longer I live like this, the less it feels like a series of choices and the more it feels like conditioning.

Not “I’m bad at boundaries.” Not “I need a better system.”

Something simpler and colder: a nervous system responding exactly as it was trained to respond.

Which is why I keep coming back to rats.

Nihil Nisi Rati Sumus

People study behaviour in humans and rodents with similar tools.

Labs use mazes, levers, and cues because they produce clean measurements. You can feel the overlap when your day becomes a chain of prompts and responses.

The rat’s laboratory matches our own labyrinth.

And in the subcultures that taught me how to look at the world in all of its glorious refusal, the rat was always there. It adorned shirts and flyers, flash tattoos and patches. Fitting for a creature that thrives in the infrastructure, survives the neglect, and learns the rules of the environment faster than the environment admits it has rules.

Laboratories keep coming back to rodents because they’re tractable: small, social, quick to learn, quick to breed, quick to adapt.

Once you start seeing human life this way, not as a morality play with a mastermind, but as behaviour shaped by environment, it becomes hard not to recognize yourself in the animal that keeps enduring the experiment.

Rats thrive in dense, human-built environments. They learn patterns quickly. They adapt behaviourally rather than ideologically. They don’t create surplus; they appear where surplus has already become waste.

The lab rat doesn’t need to understand the maze.

It only needs to survive inside it.

The Rat Isn’t Broken

There’s something comforting about that for me. Something appealing to a neurotic mess like me.

The rat doesn’t pathologize itself. It doesn’t apologize for being wired to seek reward, to respond to stimulus, to chase whatever feels urgent in the moment.

It just is.

And it keeps moving.

I’m not romanticizing animal consciousness. I’m not suggesting we abandon reflection. But there’s wisdom in recognizing what we are: creatures with ancient wiring navigating environments exquisitely tuned to exploit that wiring.

The rat isn’t broken.

The environment is perfectly calibrated.

The Headless Blunder

B.F. Skinner showed how variable rewards shape behaviour. Rewards that arrive at unpredictable times keep a behaviour going. The lever doesn’t need to work every time. It just needs to work sometimes.

The system doesn’t promise peace.

It promises the next pellet.

You don’t need a villain for this to happen. Policy, compliance, incentives, research—an accretion of reasonable choices that builds a maze no one person designed and everyone ends up trapped inside.

As Worth says in Cube, one of the most horrifying visions of a labyrinth: “Nobody is in charge. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.”

Joseph Tainter argues that societies solve problems by adding complexity until the gains shrink and the costs keep rising. Collapse, in his view, looks like fatigue. The system needs more effort to keep the same results.

Scale this down and you get me. You get us.

The Downward Spiral

This is what I mean by lowkey hellish.

Not fire and brimstone. Not overt cruelty. But something quieter, more elegant, more horrifying: an endlessly self-reinforcing spiral where optimization drives complexity, complexity demands further optimization, and all of it accelerates inward.

A hell that looks productive.

A descent that feels like progress until you notice how tired you are.

How tired we all are.

Artists have long depicted hell not as chaos, but as order taken too far. Sandro Botticelli’s map of the Inferno renders damnation as structure, hierarchy, inevitability. A funnel, a spiral, a narrowing passage. Motion without escape.

This system doesn’t need to be evil to be destructive. It only needs us to keep accepting the offer.

The multi-hyphenate. The polymath. The side-hustler. An economy built around the idea that one focus, one lane, one life is insufficient. Tools that promise to help us “do more” while making their money in the gap between reach and grasp.

The multi-armed figure isn’t aspirational.

It’s the product.

The Label Doesn’t Matter

I resist pathologizing myself. But I can’t pretend my brain works like everyone else’s. The label doesn’t matter—gifted, broken, neurodivergent, whatever term makes it legible to the system. What matters is the lived experience: a mind that treats every new idea like an emergency, that grows extra hands reflexively, convinced that this project will finally make sense of everything else.

By the time I realize I’m wrong, I’m already reaching for the next thing.

Eyes Open In The Maze

The rat doesn’t ask why the maze exists. It doesn’t demand the pellets stop appearing. It recognizes the pattern and keeps moving anyway.

Maybe that’s all I can do. Keep moving with my eyes open. Accept that some hands will hold what matters and some will hold nothing but air. That I’ll take on too much, dive too deep, reach too far—and that the cost will be real and recurring.

The system will keep profiting from my wiring. I can rage against that without pretending my wiring isn’t real.

At least I know this much: the problem was never my failure to have it all.

It’s that having it all was never possible in the first place.

Why The Rat Keeps Moving

This is Lowkey Hellish.

A newsletter about the laboratory we call life and the labyrinth we call work. About the rats who keep moving because they know what they’re about, even when the maze has no exit.

About recognizing the trap without pretending you’re not still in it.

The rat keeps moving.

Not because it believes the maze will end.

But because stopping would mean admitting the maze is all there is.

This essay first appeared in Lowkey Hellish, V13’s weekly newsletter at the intersection of culture, literature, and meaning-making in the modern age. Subscribe here.