How to fall down a rabbit hole on purpose
A short field guide to productive procrastination, and why following one weird link can teach you more than an hour of scrolling.
The rabbit hole is one of the internet's oldest pleasures. You start out reading about, say, the history of pneumatic tubes, and three hours later you're deep into a Wikipedia article about Soviet-era postal logistics, with eight tabs open and no memory of how you got there.
Modern social feeds don't really do rabbit holes. They do loops. The "next" thing is always similar to the last thing, because that's what keeps you scrolling. A rabbit hole, by contrast, takes a hard left turn.
The trick to falling down one on purpose is to follow links sideways instead of forward. Click the weird footnote. Open the dead-looking sidebar link. Visit the personal site of the person who made the thing you just looked at. The interesting parts of the web are almost always one click off the main road.
Set a timer if you have to. But once you're in, let yourself get lost.