Down The Rabbit Hole

Recently, I've found myself saying "I went down the rabbit hole" an obnoxious amount - which led me to start wondering why we use that term all the time and where it came from - so, here you go.

The first use of the phrase falling "down the rabbit hole" comes to us thanks to the great Lewis Carroll who introduced the term in 1865 in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In the story, Alice literally falls down the hole of the White Rabbit, taking her to Wonderland. In this case, falling down the rabbit hole meant entering a strange and absurd alternate universe, which many believe was supposed to represent a psychedelic experience.

For well over a century, the term went unused in common parlance. Until... the internet. The internet gave us infinite things to pique our interest to the point of distraction and unlimited ways to stay trapped in the metaphorical rabbit hole. Today, when people say they "went down the rabbit hole", they usually mean that they got sucked into spending way to long reading about or researching something on the internet.

While our mind is telling us we should be positive, our feelings are screaming at us to tell the world where to stick it. Regardless of how we feel, we realize that it won't do us any good to continue to "go down the rabbit hole", and we need to move on.