Down the Rabbit Hole
Falling into a strange, absorbing, often disorienting investigation or world.
Origin
From the opening of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) โ Alice follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a hole and into a nonsensical world. The phrase had earlier literal use but Carroll fixed it in the language.
Modern usage
Now mostly used for internet research benders ('I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole at 2 a.m.') and for radicalization or conspiracy spirals ('the algorithm took him down the rabbit hole').
In the wild
What started as one YouTube video became a three-hour rabbit hole.โ common usage
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Related
Classic Literature
Cheshire Cat
A grinning, riddling figure who appears and disappears at will โ and whose smile lingers after the rest of him is gone.
Classic Literature
Mad as a Hatter
Eccentrically, theatrically insane.
Modern Mythology
The Red Pill
Choosing to see an uncomfortable truth instead of remaining in a pleasant illusion.