Ancient nomads, wishing to ward off the evening chill and enjoy a meal around a campfire, had to collect wood and then spend time and effort coaxing the heat of friction out from between sticks to kindle a flame. With more settled people, animals were harnessed to capstans or caged in treadmills to turn grist into meal.

1995, Michael Scott Walker, The Treadmill of Water Development, and Perceptions of Drought and Scarcity in the Southern San Joaquin Valley:

1 As a result, people can easily find themselves alternating between various treadmills: the hedonic treadmill of pursuing happiness, the status treadmill requiring conspicuous consumption, and the treadmill of work undertaken to finance one's activity on the other two treadmills.

Elizabeth Schor (1999) has long argued that this status treadmill, even if not universal, has worked to “ratchet” global conceptualizations of need and desire upward over time.

Most of us are so busy "earning each day our daily bread" that we have but little "open" time. […] Occasionally one wonders "What's it all for, anyway?" For years he's been treadmilling it, day in and day out, and presently the graying hair at the temples will shock him into the grim reality that he is getting old—and getting little else.

Back we were in the rat race, treadmilling sixty hours a week and sleeping forty, our sex life was like that of most busy cohabiters I suppose: fun, frolicky, and squeezed in haphazardly when we had a minute—or thirty.

Treadmill

Meaning

Noun

Verb

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