Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #177

I'm back!

Jul 29, 2026

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while… 😅 but after I finally got surgery to relieve me of my back pain (read my last update in April for full context), got many super kind and supportive messages from you, a couple new subscribers asking me where they could sign up for the paid subscription (which I had on pause) and even got featured in a New York Times Magazine article 🤪, I thought it’s about time to carve out a small chunk in my schedule to finally put together the popular rabbit holes issues regularly again. Not weekly, as before - I do unfortunately not have enough time for that -, but monthly.

So here we go! Very excited to be back at this. And a big welcome to all the new subscribers!

Let’s get into it:

THIS MONTH ↓
🖼️ Framings: Losing Curiosity // Lotus-Eaters // Everything Is Private Equity
📊 Numbers: The Great Rackification
🌀 Re-Framings: Smartness → Mental Effort // Wall-E Environments → Ambient Exercise // Renting Your Hours → Owning Your Work
🧬 Frameworks: ‘Bro’ Automation vs. Living Automation
🎨 Works: 90s video shop with 2026 content // Living Speaker // Bloody Newspaper

⏳ Reading Time: 12 min

graphical user interface, text, application

🖼️ Framings

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

🤓 Losing Curiosity

“More than 60 percent of Google searches in the United States now end without the user clicking on a link. We type a question, read an artificial-intelligence-generated summary of the results and leave with our answer. […]
For anyone who publishes on the internet, this is a troubling development, since it lowers website traffic and makes protecting and profiting from your intellectual property more difficult. But you might think it is good news for internet users. Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?
There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity — and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world. […]
Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. […]
In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board. […]
Researchers call this incidental learning, and it’s the mechanism behind many serendipitous discoveries. Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. […]
Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints. The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own. […]
The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask.”

» We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

🪷 Becoming Lotus-Eaters

“One of the most important (and overlooked) scenes in the Odyssey is the encounter with the Lotus-eaters. After nine days at sea, Odysseus and his men finally reach dry land. They go ashore to collect water, and Odysseus sends three men to go explore.
When his men don’t return, Odysseus begins to worry. The men had met some of the islanders (the Lotus-eaters), “who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back”. Odysseus ends up having to drag his men back to the ships and quickly sail away.
One must understand the symbolic power of the lotus. Its danger is not in any physical threat. The lotus is so deadly because it overloads you with pleasure, taking away all sense of urgency.
In this state of pleasure and relaxation, you forget your mission and your purpose. The men who ate the lotus flowers completely forgot about everything of value in their lives: their homes, their families, etc.
It’s easy to think the monsters and beasts are the most terrifying threats you face. But because they’re so obviously dangerous and remind you that death is a real possibility, they alert you to the value of life, and remind you of why you’re fighting. But the real danger is a life so comfortable that you forget what you were trying to do in the first place.
Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely you’ll ever go to war or die of famine. But it is certainly possible that an addiction to your phone will derail you from your mission. Abundance of food and entertainment is far more likely to destroy you than most physical threats.
Yes, you will encounter plenty of Sirens and Cyclopes in life. But the real threat, which you must fend off every single day, is that of the lotus flower: a delicious indulgence that brings you immediate satisfaction, and makes you forget what you were fighting for.

» Substack note by The Culturist

👨‍💼 Everything Is Private Equity

“I bought a dress for a wedding last month from Reformation. It was $350, which is more than I would normally spend on any item of clothing, but it was silk and I figured that I could wear it again.
When it arrived, it was horrendous. The stitching was off. The fabric didn’t feel like silk — and listen, I’m not a fashion person, I wasn’t going to do a burn test on it. But it felt like... fast fashion. Like something you’d get at Zara for $60. Except it was $350.
I had never shopped at Reformation before, but I thought they had a reputation for high-quality, ethical clothes. So I did what I always do when something feels off: I Googled. And there … I discovered it.
All roads lead to Rome, as they say. Except today, all roads lead to private equity.
Why does everything seem … shittier these days? The quality of your food, your furniture, your clothes is getting worse. Everything that used to be boring and reliable — healthcare, housing, the background infrastructure of daily life — has been quietly acquired, optimized, and hollowed out. […]
Private equity often operates in the background, buying up all facets of American life. PE now touches nearly every sector of the economy. You could go an entire day — wake up in a PE-owned apartment, drop your kid at a PE-owned daycare, see a PE-owned doctor, pick up dinner from a PE-owned restaurant, come home and watch the local news on a PE-run TV station — without ever encountering a business that operates the way you assume businesses operate. […]
In many cases, they own multiple companies in the same category — creating the illusion of choice. You’re not really deciding anymore, you’re just choosing between different subsidiaries of the same financial investment, optimized for the same outcome: Extracting maximum value from you while you try to live your life.
As Molly Osberg wrote in The New Republic, PE’s “central conceit is that financiers, not skilled workers or industry experts, are best positioned to figure out what makes any given business work.””

» Everything is private equity <3 by Hanna Horvath

📈 Numbers

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

💾 The Great Rackification

“Recently, we came across a graph with a clear message: by the end of 2025, spending on building data centres in the US overtook that on office buildings for the first time in history. The need for desks is going down, while the hunger for server racks is endless. […]
Data centres are gradually taking over the role of office buildings, just as bots are taking over the tasks of knowledge workers.”
via The great rackification by Pop-Up City