We mean that we got interested in something to the point of distraction-usually by accident, and usually to a degree that the subject in question might not seem to merit.” If you’re Neo in the hit film The Matrix, you can take the red pill-a pill that shows you the truth, as opposed to the blue pill, which keeps you in ignorance-and “see how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In a related note, some people literally take pills and go down the rabbit hole of a psychedelic drug trip.īut as Kathryn Schulz observed for The New Yorker in 2015, rabbit hole has further evolved in the information age: “These days…when we say that we fell down the rabbit hole, we seldom mean that we wound up somewhere psychedelically strange. One can fall down the rabbit hole of government bureaucracy, healthcare, obtaining a green card, tax law, the political economy of modern Japan, puberty, college admissions, or quantum mechanics.

Rabbit hole has many metaphorical applications-from frustrating red tape to the mind-bending complexity of science to hallucinations during altered states-all united by a common sense of passing into some labyrinthine, logic-defying realm that, once entered, is hard to get out of. It’s especially used to reference magical, challenging, and even dangerous places or positions, similar to Carroll’s topsy-turvy Wonderland. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first allusive rabbit hole in a 1938 edition of The Yale Law Journal: “It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange.” Over much of the 20th century, rabbit hole has been used to characterize bizarre and irrational experiences. Since then, Carroll’s rabbit hole has proved a popular and useful reference. In its opening chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” Alice follows the White Rabbit into his burrow, which transports her to the strange, surreal, and nonsensical world of Wonderland. But the figurative rabbit hole begins with Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The earliest written record of the phrase dates back to the 17th century. Literally, a rabbit hole is what the animal digs for its home.

Fall into a black hole game