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The Strange Origins of Getting Lost

The Strange Origins of Getting Lost

The phrase down the rabbit hole began as a simple storybook chapter title before evolving into a modern metaphor for losing yourself in internet research. It describes a journey into a complex, bewildering world you never intended to enter.

Lewis Carroll coined this iconic idiom in 1865 for the opening of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. While it originally referred to Alice literally falling into a bizarre dreamscape, it now perfectly captures our digital habits. Today, we use it to describe the feeling of clicking one link after another until we have spent hours falling down an endless spiral of information. It is a rare case of a literary trope adapting to describe the unique psychological phenomenon of modern web browsing.

Source: Down the rabbit hole

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