Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #121

From domicide to the symbolic executive, tiny gods and dreaming of flip phones, the infinite workday, managing knowledge → living knowledge, choosing (meaningful) struggle, and native land maps

Hello and welcome to the 87 new subscribers who joined us since last week.

I am sharing a small part of my Craft of Reframing methodology for free: The Reframing Canvas. This is a simple, clear, very actionable canvas that you can use in your research process, during a workshop or meeting, to quickly reframe a certain topic or system and build creative ideas on top of it. Click the button below to download it for free:

And please do reach out if you want me to explain this method to you or your team, or do a workshop with you!

But now, onto this week’s Rabbit Holes:

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: Domicide // The Symbolic Executive // Tiny Gods
📊 Numbers: The Infinite Workday
🌀 Re-Framings: Managing Knowledge → Living Knowledge // Avoiding Struggle → Choosing (Meaningful) Struggle // Systems Change
🧬 Frameworks: 7 Steps to Quietly Exit a System That Wants You Dependent
🎨 Works: Basecamp Lyngby // Native Land // Nox Nighttrains

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

🖼️ Framings

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

🏚️ Domicide

First time I come across this term (and framing), but it makes a lot of sense as an overarching theme. Our present is already very much defined by what one could generally describe as the disappearance of home. And this will be even more so in the future due to wars, financial crises, housing prices, loneliness (or community-lessness), and climate breakdown.

“We are witnessing a global war on the sanctity of home. And the climate movement is finding the language to name it. […]

Across Gaza, what’s being destroyed is not just infrastructure. The scale and intent of the destruction points to a deeper strategy that aims to displace the Gaza strip’s population and ensure that what was once home can never be reclaimed. That kind of violence has a name: domicide.

In legal terms, domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specific goals. It is a framework that centers not just the loss of physical shelter, but the loss of cultural continuity, collective memory, and the spatial foundations of identity. […]

Where genocide seeks the destruction of a people, domicide describes the destruction of the spaces that allow a people to exist. It names a violence that is both physical and psychological: the erasure of a landscape that holds belonging and the capacity for return. […]

We know how to recognize home destroyed by force—by war, by fire, by raids. But what about home that disappears slowly, without spectacle? […]

We live in a world increasingly shaped by displacement, by flood, by fire, by force. But when we identify that loss as domicide, we reframe it as intent. The genocide in Gaza, the violence in Los Angeles, the slow deterioration of ecosystems across Pacific Island nations. These are intentional acts of violence connected by the deeper truth that climate justice has never just been about emissions data and temperature targets—important though they are. It’s about power; about who is protected, and who is left behind.”

» From Gaza to LA, the Right to Remain Is Under Attack by Aditi Mayer

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👔 The Symbolic Executive

Excellent long read by Ed Zitron that lines up with the concept of Managerialism, which I shared here before. This framing of executives and managers as being symbolic explains, IMO, an increasingly disseminating feeling of meaninglessness in the business world.

“We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value. […]

The Chief Executive — who makes over 300 times more than their average worker — is no longer a leadership position, but a kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company. It is a position inherently defined by its lack of labor, the amorphousness of its purpose and its lack of any clear responsibility. […]

Management as a concept no longer means doing "work," but establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good their revenue is today, but how good revenue might be tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more. A "manager," much like a CEO, is no longer a position with any real responsibility — they're there to make sure you're working, to know enough about your work that they can sort of tell you what to do, but somehow the job of "telling you what to do" doesn't come with it any actual work, and the instructions don’t need to be useful or even meaningful.

Management has, over the course of the past few decades, eroded the very fabric of corporate America, and I'd argue it’s done the same in multiple other western economies, too.”

» The Era of the Business Idiot by Ed Zitron

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🤳 Tiny Gods

This framing is a bit more metaphorical and in the form of a poem, but it’s so well written that I had to share it – and it relates to the “cloud god” piece I shared a while ago. Do let me know if you like this more metaphorical, artsy stuff (or not?), cause I’ve got quite a bit more saved.

“all my friends and I talk about is
getting rid of our phones—
a dystopian dream
dominating dinner conversation,
our phones on the middle
of the table
like candles
like altars
like tiny gods
we are trying not to worship

we talk about quitting
like smokers do—
“next week”
“after this trip”
“when I found the love of my life on a dating app” […]

we dream of flip phones—
clamshells of another life
decorated with glitter and stones and
dangly   little charms
the pixels soft enough to
forgive our youthful acne
and ringtones we bought
by texting MTV […]

somewhere,
there is a version of me
who dared to take the leap
she knows the constellations
by name
her eyes are soft
from looking
outwards […]

and i hate it—
i hate it
this tether
this glass ghost
this thing too big to
understand

i’m tired and
my window to the world
has no curtains”

» all my friends and i talk about is getting rid of our phones by

quirine brouwer

📈 Numbers

A thought-provoking chart that perfectly captures a pivotal shift:

The Infinite Workday

© Microsoft Work Trend Index

Thank you for reading this Rabbit Holes issuel. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this going is the generosity of those readers who decided to upgrade to paid.

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short re-framings for building better systems or worlds that I’ve recently come across:

🌼 Managing Knowledge → Living Knowledge

“For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. Etc.

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

And so… Well, I killed the whole thing. […]

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it — and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing. […]

In design, we speak of subtraction as refinement. A sculptor chips away everything that is not the figure. A musician cuts a line that clutters the melody. But in knowledge work, we hoard. We treat accumulation as a virtue.

But what if deletion is the truer discipline?

I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface not because I indexed them, but because they mattered.

I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.”

» I Deleted My Second Brain by Joan Westernberg

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💪 Avoiding Struggle → Choosing (Meaningful) Struggle

“We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building. Tending a garden requires effort, but you get to eat the tomatoes. Raising children is exhausting, but you get to watch them become themselves. Creating something meaningful will drain you, but you get to point at it and say, "I made that." […]

Gen Z has been raised on the mantra of "protecting your peace", the idea that anything causing stress or discomfort should be eliminated from your life. This advice, while well-intentioned, has created a generation allergic to necessary friction. […]

But peace isn't the absence of problems, it's the presence of purpose that makes problems worth solving. The happiest people aren't those who've eliminated difficulty from their lives; they're those who've found difficulty worth enduring. […]

Convenience is stealing everything from us if we let it. The friction is where the growth happens. The resistance is where we build strength. Work, real work, will give us fulfillment in ways we never expected, in ways that all the optimization hacks and life shortcuts never could. […]

In nature, adversity isn't the enemy of growth. It's the condition for it.

Ultimately, here's what I think we should tell young people about work: it will be harder than you expect and more rewarding than you can imagine, sometimes on the same day. […]

We owe young people the truth: hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having. Everything good requires work. Discipline trumps motivation. Meaning emerges not from avoiding struggle but from choosing struggle that serves something larger than yourself.”

» why are we lying to young people about work? by

Maalvika

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🔄 Systems Change

“I've stopped using the phrase "systems change."

Why? Because it keeps our attention tethered to what’s broken and what’s crumbling. It distracts us with what resists transformation. It seduces us into believing that with enough reform, repair, or finesse, we can redeem a system built upon a foundational worldview of separation, extraction, and control. It channels our focus and our energy on trying to tinker at what was never designed to hold life with sanctity and dignity in the first place. Buckminster Fuller reminded us that we don't transform the world by fighting the old, we do it by building the new, or as I would put it, the (k)new, with such coherence and beauty that the old becomes irrelevant.

The hard truth is this: the old system doesn’t want to be fixed, nor can it. It cannot be changed. In fact, some systems are not meant to be changed, they are meant to be composted. I've stopped trying to refine, prolong and optimize the destructiveness. I am not here for that, that's a waste of energy.

I'm here to remember the future. And remembering is not a concept or an intellectual trick. I am here to build parallel architectures of care, reciprocity, and deep aliveness. I am not here for systems change. I've stopped trying to Trojan Horse my way into the door of someone who doesn't want me there anyway.

I've gotten over my disruption, and gotten into my invitation.”

» LinkedIn Post by Ryan James Kemp

🧬 Frameworks

One small, handy framework to build more regenerative, beautiful, and just systems:

7 Steps to Quietly Exit a System That Wants You Dependent by

Mike Jones

🎨 Works

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking and inspiring work:

© Basecamp Lyngby

© Native Land Digital: Decolonizing The World Map

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

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Thomas