You want the real windows into someone's soul? Look at their Reddit subscriptions. It's all there: their passions, their hobbies, their ideological leanings, their love of terrible haircuts and sublime anonymized cringe. And if they're anything like me, those subscriptions also tell the tale of a life spent diving down rabbit holes.
Origami. Board games. Trail running. Pens. Cycling. Mechanical keyboards. Scrabble. (I know. God, I know. There are jokes to be made here. Trust that I've already made them all myself.) Whenever my interest attaches itself to a new thing—which has happened my entire life, cyclically and all-encompassingly—I tend to develop a singular, insatiable appetite for information about that thing. Hey, you know what the internet is really good at? Enabling singular, insatiable appetites.
Especially since 2005. That's the year Reddit and YouTube launched within months of each other, and obsession became centralized. You had options before that, blogs and message boards and Usenet forums, but they weren't exactly magnets of cross-pollination. They didn't fully open the floodgates to minute details and the masses yearning to pore over them. Then, on opposite sides of the country, two different small groups of twentysomething dudes created twin engines of infatuation. Between their massive tents and their ease of use, Reddit and YouTube tore away the guardrail that had always stood between serial hobbyists and oblivion.
For all the hand-wringing about both sites—YouTube's gameable recommendation algorithm that can radicalize dummies at the drop of a meme, Reddit's chelonian foot speed when dealing with bad actors and hate speech in the more noisome subreddits—both are incredible resources for the participatory realm. Watching more experienced people do what you're trying to do, sharing setups and techniques, even getting support and commiseration from those who are similarly, rapturously afloat in the same thing you can't stop reading and thinking about: It's not just a recipe for intellectual indulgence, but for improvement as well. (On YouTube, that value comes from the creator; on Reddit, it comes from the comments. Swap the two at your own peril.)
Rabbit holes are what make Beauty YouTube such a colossus, why the Ask Science subreddit has 16 million subscribers. But they also hold a secret: The deeper you go, the tighter it gets. That's because a rabbit hole is a filter bubble of sorts, albeit one that's labeled as such and explicitly opted into—you're there because you're interested in this Thing, as is everyone else, and under such celebratory scrutiny that Thing distends, its perceived stature far outweighing its real-life impact. Just because there are a million opinions about something doesn't make it important to anyone outside the bubble, let alone crucial.
And before long, orthodoxy rears its head. Want to make coffee? Oh, you're going to need to spend hours dialing in the grind on your $1,000 Mazzer Mini E before pouring 205-degree water over it from your gooseneck kettle. Don't forget to account for the bloom! Want to get a new keyboard that feels better and looks nicer than your laptop's? Great, but Topre switches or GTFO. Oh, and don't stop at one. Or two. Or 17.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a collector. I love the right tool for the right job, and I love research even more. (I'm really fucking weird about my pens.) But more than once I've become consumed by the idea that my experience with a Thing will be utterly transformed if I just treat myself to the right running vest. Or digital temperature regulator for an espresso machine. Or, yes, Scrabble-themed keycaps. That's not the joy of collecting; it's the expectation of fulfillment. I watch video reviews, or read people waxing rhapsodic, and it changes my Thing from a learning process, an intrinsic enjoyment, to a preamble. There's an "endgame"; there are "grails." Get the grail, and you're in the endgame.
But there's no endgame, and there's no grail. There's no bottom to the rabbit hole.
What there is is learning more about a thing you like to do, and maybe getting better at it. Running longer. Enjoying the feel of your pen on paper. Playing a game with friends. Everything else is just a commercial. So jump into all the rabbit holes you want���just don't expect to find Wonderland.
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