Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #105

From the addiction economy to a row in an excel sheet, messy lives, being an agent of care, life as earth, the relationship recession, creator gravity, requiem for a tree, and unoffice hours

Thomas Klaffke

Feb 05, 2025

Hello!

A few short updates before we go into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

♦︎ For those wanting to work with me, there’s a dedicated page for that now:

Work With Me 🫵

Thomas Klaffke

January 30, 2025

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♦︎ I re-edited and updated my latest deep dive post as I’m experimenting with a new style and structure:

People Want A Political Revolution. Let's Give Them One!

Thomas Klaffke

January 26, 2025

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♦︎ Lastly, I had a bit of a rant on LinkedIn and talked about double-down on building The Resilience. For this newsletter, this means that I will focus even more on sharing actionable resources (perspectives, frameworks, and examples) with you that’ll help you build a new(!) system. If this sounds jibberish to you, read my post and stay tuned!

And now, without any further ado, let’s get into this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: The Addiction Economy // A Row In An Excel Sheet // Messy Lives
🌀 Re-Framings: Agent of Change → Agent of Care // Life on Earth → Life as Earth // Influence → Gravity
🧬 Frameworks: Community Weaving
🎨 Works: The Story of 2050 // Requiem for a Tree // Unoffice Hours

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

~~Naming~~ Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

💉 The Addiction Economy

Looking at economic progress from an addiction perspective. Brilliant, revealing, and to the point! Best read while listening to I can’t get no satisfaction and imprinting this sentence by John Foster in your brain: “the politics required must now be understood as therapeutic.”

“Pundits claim we live in an “attention economy.” We don’t. Attention is just a metric for addiction. The addiction economy is broader, encompassing media, technology, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, pharma, and health care.
The world’s most valuable resource isn’t data, compute, oil, or rare earth metals; it’s dopa, i.e., the fuel of the addiction economy, which runs the most valuable companies in history. Addiction has always been a component of capitalism — nothing rivals the power of craving to manufacture demand and support irrational margins. Sugar and rum were the dopa-delivery systems and currency of the Triangle Trade. Later, the British East India Company was the Sinaloa Cartel of the 19th century, producing and distributing a product China became addicted to: opium. At its peak in the last century, Big Tobacco acquired customers with TV ads and endorsements from doctors, but the addictive ingredient, nicotine, is how the industry extracts $86k to $195k per customer — and costs those customers $1 million to $2 million in expenditures, opportunity costs, and health-care expenses.
Historically, the most valuable companies turn dopa into consumption. Over the last 100 years, 15 of the top 30 companies by cumulative compound return have been pillars of the addiction economy. The compounders cluster in tobacco (Altria +265,528,900%), the food industrial complex (Coca-Cola +12,372,265%), pharma (Wyeth +5,702,341%), and retailers (Kroger +2,834,362%) that sell both substances and treatments. To predict which companies will be the top compounders over the next century, consider this: Eight of the world’s 10 most valuable businesses turn dopa into attention, or make picks and shovels for these dopa merchants.”

» Addiction Economy by Scott Galloway

🗂️ A Row In An Excel Sheet

Last week, I shared a piece about the depressing job-hunting experience of young graduates. This week, I have a piece about the experience of getting laid off by an experienced backend developer. Why am I sharing this stuff with you? Well, it accentuates 2 of the 4 Themes for 2025: A Dying Age & Slowing Down.

“When I looked back on my time at the company and all the things I had accomplished, I was surprised to be impacted by the layoffs. It wasn’t because I thought I was better than others—it was because I believed I was doing more than what was expected of me. However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. In most cases, the decision is made by people who don’t even know you. This realization made me question the concept of work, which is part of the reason I’m writing this blog post. […]
Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions, the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the company was financially stable, your job was secure.
But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-breaking financial results. You work hard, focus on impactful projects, and receive praise from your lead—only to find yourself let go by someone who likely doesn’t even know you exist. It feels as though the trust between companies and employees is now broken. Companies, it seems, are either unaware of this shift or unwilling to address it. And frankly, I’m not sure how they could fix it. […]
For those like me who’ve experienced layoffs, work has become just that—work. You do what’s assigned, and if your company squanders your potential or forces you to waste time on unnecessary projects, you simply stop caring. You collect your paycheck at the end of the month, and that’s it. This is the new modern work: no more striving to be 40% better every year.”

» Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again by Mert Bulan

🥴 Messy Lives

This goes back to one of my most popular posts Aliveness: Reframing Productivity, and how the productivity and optimization logic has become a dominant part of not only our culture but our mindset.

“Everywhere I look, there’s this relentless push to curate every aspect of our lives into something that can be packaged and shared. We can’t even sit at a coffee shop without turning it into some aesthetic Insta post, zooming in on a corner of a croissant. It’s like we’ve turned the pursuit of a good life into a branding exercise, and no one knows how to stop. […]
The things that matter—the homes, the routines, the small moments that feel like you—they take time to break in. You can’t shortcut your way to a life that feels lived-in. It’s something that builds slowly, through messy trial and error, until one day it clicks.
The problem is, we don’t want to wait for things to click. Nostalgia makes it worse. It convinces you that if you just buy the right lamp or find the perfect chair, you can recreate the cozy, meaningful life you think existed in the past.
That’s the real issue, I think. We want the good part without the process. We want the quiet, layered life without going through the messiness of building it. But the messiness is where life actually happens. It’s the awkward routines, the regret purchases, the moments that don’t make sense until years later. […]
We’ve been taught to treat our lives like projects that can be optimized and improved, instead of something messy and human that grows over time. Maybe the quiet life isn’t about having the perfect lamp or the coziest sweater. Maybe it’s about letting go of the need to control it all and just letting life happen.”

» The Problem with Wanting Less by What Ever Happened

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:

❤️‍🩹 Agent of Change → Agent of Care

“I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings, as well as how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing.
What I've seen work in real life are activities such as mutual aid, caring for neighbors, bringing meals to firefighters or the newly homeless in Los Angeles. I’ve experienced the power of friendship, kindness, or just listening, processing, and metabolizing. A lot of the activism I did and much of what I see functions more like traditional medicine that's looking at the organs — at the things — where the care addresses the in between, the interstitial, maybe even the palliative. And radical care, radical compassion may just be a surer path to the kinds of change that activism is trying to create. Even if care is a more subtle, seemingly indirect approach. And in a moment like this, when there are so many things coming so quickly that it's hard to know what to say about anyone one of them, I start to realize that the things I have to say about those things don't matter; that watching those things and being addicted to The Trump Show Season Two, with guest star Elon Musk, and each new exciting episode is itself a distraction from the care I could be giving at any given moment. It also compromises my readiness to take action when a real activist or someone who actually knows what we should do tells me, “hey, Rushkoff, show up here for this thing.”
I’m not talking about socialism so much as the social. Together, we can retrieve and rebuild the social reality: the inter-human and ideally inter-species connections that actually define living existence, and serve as the culture in which everything else grows.”

» Everything is In-Between by Douglas Rushkoff

🌳 Life on Earth → Life as Earth

“Did you know that the living beings and organisms of the Amazon rainforest play active roles in re-generating their regional water cycles?
‘The Amazon rainforest is spewing these invisible plumes of biological particles—pollen grains, fungal spores, microbes, even fragments of insect shells, bits and pieces of leaves and bark.
All of these tiny particles go into the atmosphere with the water vapor coming off the forest — they give vapor something to condense onto. That is what’s essential for the formation of clouds. Then some of these bioaerosols, as they're known, will even seed ice crystals within clouds. When that happens, clouds become much larger and heavier, [and] they fall as rain much more quickly.
There's even a bacterium, Pseudomonas syringae [that] can freeze cloud water into ice, making the clouds much heavier. […]
Biology, life, microbes, and plants, have an important part of the water cycle. It's not just a passive recipient like a straw that sucks things up and then puts water back into the sky. It's playing a much more active role than that.
When I learned this ten years ago, it started to change how I thought about the relationship between life and the planet. Life on Earth has the power to shape the weather — the topography, structure, and chemistry of the planet as a whole.’
This was one of the most fascinating things I learned from my latest interview with Ferris Jabr, the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. It underscores the idea that we cannot separate chemistry, physics, biology, ecology, geology, and other earth studies from one another — if we want to really understand what it means to heal our planet.
It also reminds me of my curiosity to reframe the common saying “life on Earth” to “life as Earth” or “life as part of Earth” — because the latter better illustrates the entanglement of life and the planetary body.”

» Re-rooting science in the aliveness of the Earth, ft. Ferris Jabr by UPROOTED

🌀 Influence → Gravity

“Ever feel like you just know a creator even though you discovered them 7 minutes ago? Read an article and go, “I have to find out who wrote this?” Have that one podcaster whose voice has been the soundtrack of your commute for years?
That’s creator gravity.
A creator with gravity has three pillars:
Purpose: There is a clear mission.
Health: The content is "nutritionally rich."
Energy: The work is undeniably theirs. […]
There’s a big difference between someone who has “gravity” versus “influence.”
The latter belongs to what I consider the “old internet.” It’s defined by manufactured moments of intimacy, bogus growth tactics, and relentless consumerism. […] Sure, these tactics work from time to time. And they might even go viral! But we’re all so, so tired of it.
People are done orbiting these banalified, transactional, plastic planets. They want to lose themselves in Earth-like worlds; worlds teeming with genuine thoughts, lush with curiosity, pulsing with personality.
This is the “new” internet—and people are ravenous for it.”

» WTF is Creator Gravity? by Alice Lemee

🧬 Frameworks

Community Weaving

“Communities are beautiful. When humans come together guided by generosity, trust and care, magic happens and life flourishes. Yet it feels increasingly like our relational webs are unraveling. This project is an invitation to reimagine what community means in these times of transition. And to explore a question together: How can we weave healthy communities?”