It is common, in my circles, to speak of “going down the rabbit hole.” Writers, of course, are notorious for starting to research some minor point and emerging hours later having chased down one idea only to find another sort-of-related point that must also be investigated and so on.
My partner, who only writes when he has to, does the same thing just for the hell of it – and then bemoans the fact that he stayed up too late chasing down ideas on his screen. He complains he spends too much time staring at a screen, but of course what he’s doing there is reading something interesting that leads to something else interesting, which I don’t think is the real problem with too much screen time.
I mean, people like me and my partner and most of the writers I know would be doing the same thing without the internet. We’d just be doing it with dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, various other books around the house and – once we’d exhausted those sources – the nearest library.
Going down rabbit holes is part of what makes life worth living.
Funny, though, when I looked the phrase up online – to determine if, in fact, it does come from Alice in Wonderland (it apparently does) – I saw a few comments that implied that it’s not a positive thing.
For example, the Wikipedia entry says:
It has come to mean that someone has become interested in something, usually by accident; and often the subject does not deserve the amount of attention that a person gives.
I say “bah.”
The reason I am writing about this is because I read a piece in The New York Times by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff entitled “We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask.” (gift link). In this essay, which among other things critiques the use of so-called AI, she observes:
Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting.
That resonated with me deeply. I love undirected exploration. I’m very inefficient at research. And more than anything else, I love connecting things from very different points of view, things that might not seem connected to anyone else. Continue reading “Down the Rabbit Hole”…