[Anon1096]

One of my favorite things to come out of Alice in Wonderland is the Red Queen's Race, which has been used as a metaphor in many many fields for the concept of needing to work as hard as you can just to keep up with others, not even to get ahead.

> "Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

> "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

Also related, recently it's been used to describe involution (neijuan) in the chinese economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan