It's half past two in the morning and I'm reading about the history of Japanese convenience stores. I didn't set out to do this. I set out to check one thing - something about a typeface, I think - and twenty-seven clicks later I'm deep in the story of how 7-Eleven became the most important retail format in Tokyo. I've seventeen tabs open. I've forgotten what I originally came to look up. I'm having the time of my life.
This is the Wikipedia rabbit hole, and if you've never fallen into one, I genuinely feel sorry for you. Not because the specific knowledge matters - I'll forget most of it by morning - but because the experience of following threads, of letting curiosity lead you from one unexpected place to another, is one of the purest forms of intellectual pleasure available. It costs nothing. It requires nothing except a willingness to click and see where it goes.
And I think it's one of the most underrated skills a person can develop.
The hyperlink is underrated
We take hyperlinks for granted now. They're so fundamental to how the internet works that we don't even see them anymore. But the hyperlink is, genuinely, one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. Not because it lets you navigate between pages - that's the mechanical function. Because it lets you follow a thought. It turns reading from a linear experience into a branching one. Every hyperlink is a door. Every click is a choice. And the path you take through those doors reveals something about how your mind works.
I've spent enough time in Wikipedia rabbit holes to notice patterns in my own curiosity. I'm drawn to origin stories - how things started, who had the first idea, what the world looked like before the thing existed. I'm drawn to unlikely connections - the jazz musician who influenced a tech founder, the wartime invention that became a household product, the obscure academic paper that changed an entire industry. I'm drawn to the edges, where one subject bleeds into another and the boundaries get fuzzy.
These patterns aren't random. They're taste. The rabbit hole is a taste-mapping exercise. What you choose to click on, when you have infinite choices, is one of the most honest expressions of what interests you. No algorithm is mediating these choices. No feed is ranking them. It's just you, a page of blue links, and the question: which one do I want to know more about?
How curiosity becomes creativity
There's a direct line between the rabbit hole and the work I do. Not in the obvious sense - I'm not building products about Japanese convenience stores (though honestly, I might). In the sense that the practice of following curiosity, of accumulating knowledge across wildly different domains, is what makes creative work possible.
Steve Jobs talked about connecting dots. Everyone quotes this and nobody does it. Connecting dots requires having dots to connect. Most people's dot collection is shallow and narrow - they know a lot about their field and almost nothing about anything else. The Wikipedia rabbit hole is a dot-collection engine. Every session adds dots from unexpected places. And eventually, inevitably, those dots start to connect.
Modern Retro exists because I had dots about 1970s retail design, dots about AI image generation, dots about brand identity, and dots about nostalgia culture. None of those dots came from the same place. They accumulated over years of reading about things that had nothing to do with each other, until one day they snapped together and I saw a project that nobody else was making because nobody else had that specific combination of references.
This is what I mean when I say taste is an unfair advantage. It isn't just about knowing what looks good. It's about having a wide enough range of references that you can make connections others can't. The person who has only ever read about their own industry will only ever have ideas that are slight variations on what already exists in their industry. The person who reads about everything - architecture, food, music, history, sport, fashion, science - has a much larger space of possible connections. Their ideas come from further afield. They're, by definition, more original.
The lost art of browsing
The internet used to be designed for rabbit holes. In the early days, the whole experience was about following links from one place to another. Blogrolls - remember blogrolls? - were curated lists of other sites worth visiting. Every blog was a potential portal to a dozen other blogs. The web was a web in the truest sense: interconnected, sprawling, full of dead ends and surprising discoveries.
Social media killed this. Not intentionally, perhaps, but effectively. When the feed became the primary interface to the internet, browsing died. You no longer followed threads. Threads came to you, pre-selected by algorithms designed to maximise engagement rather than curiosity. The difference is enormous. Engagement-optimised content is designed to provoke a reaction. Curiosity-driven browsing is designed to satisfy a question and raise three more.
I miss the browsing internet. I miss the feeling of stumbling onto a page you never would have found if you had been searching for something specific. I miss the serendipity of it - the way a random click could change what you thought about for the rest of the week. Wikipedia is one of the last places this still works properly. It's designed for rabbit holes. Every page is dense with blue links. Every link is an invitation. The architecture of the site says: go deeper, go wider, follow the thread.
What I found at 3am
Let me tell you about the best rabbit hole I ever fell into. It started with a question about why Japanese train stations play different jingles when a train arrives. This led me to the concept of hassha melody - departure melodies composed specifically for individual stations. Which led me to Minoru Mukaiya, a musician who composed many of them. Which led me to his band Casiopea, a Japanese jazz fusion group from the 1980s. Which led me to the broader concept of city pop - a Japanese musical genre that has become massively popular with Western audiences decades after it was made. Which led me to the idea of cultural time travel - how the internet allows us to discover entire cultural movements from other countries and eras as if they were new.
That last concept - cultural time travel - became a lens through which I now see several of my projects. Modern Retro is cultural time travel. It takes you to a version of the 1970s that never existed. CultureTerminal surfaces current culture but frames it through a retro-futuristic interface. The idea of experiencing culture outside its original time and place is central to how I think about what I build.
None of this would have happened if I had Googled "cultural time travel" at the start. I wouldn't have known to search for it. The concept didn't exist in my mind until I arrived at it through a chain of curiosity that began with Japanese train jingles. That's the magic of the rabbit hole. You don't find what you were looking for. You find what you didn't know you were looking for. And sometimes that's far more valuable.
A defence of wasting time
I know how this sounds. A grown man, up at 3am, reading Wikipedia instead of sleeping. It sounds unproductive. It sounds like procrastination. And maybe it is, sometimes. But I've come to believe that this kind of unstructured exploration is actually one of the most productive things I do. Not productive in the spreadsheet sense. Productive in the sense that it fills the well. It gives me raw material. It keeps my thinking fresh and surprising and connected to the wider world rather than trapped in whatever bubble my daily routine creates.
The internet is an extraordinary thing. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in human history. And what do most of us do with it? We check the same five apps in rotation. We scroll the same feeds. We consume the same algorithmically-selected content as everyone else. The rabbit hole is the antidote to this. It's an act of rebellion against the feed. It's choosing curiosity over consumption. It's using the internet the way it was designed to be used - as a tool for exploration, not a machine for distraction.
So here's my advice, for whatever it's worth: the next time you find yourself on Wikipedia at an unreasonable hour, don't close the tab. Click the next blue link. Follow the thread. See where it goes. You might end up reading about Japanese convenience stores. You might end up with the seed of an idea that changes how you think about your work. Either way, you'll have had a better evening than whatever Netflix was offering.
The internet's best feature is still the hyperlink. Use it.
