🌀🐇 #245 dreamweaving, doomscrolling, soul gardening

Plus Why Kindness and Cooperation are More Natural Than Selfishness

In partnership with

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🔮 How Collective DreamWeaving Can Heal the World: By transforming narrative warfare into collaborative vision gardening through a shared "InterBrain," we can transcend division and co-create a unified, peaceful future. Watch it here.

🪴 Soul Gardening: Or it's never too late to plant a few seeds for our next lifetime. Read it here.

🤳 How To Be A Better Doomscroller Than 99% Of Social Media Addicts: A provocative and humorous deep dive into the psychology of doomscrolling—revealing how shame, avoidance, and self-judgment fuel compulsive social media use. Watch it here.

🍄 Help Make Psilocybin a Tool for Wellbeing: What if psychedelics could be used proactively to help us stay well, not just to treat illness? Learn more.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

This photo was snapped by the incredible swedish biologist Olle Amcoff or @mossranger as he’s known on instagram. Here’s what he said about it “Earlier this year I uploaded a picture of this butterfly sitting on an orchid. I Also took some closeups of that same butterfly which is what you see here. "Bluewings" as we call them in Sweden are so beautiful!” See a video compilation of his work here.

 👶 For My Son

Here are some things I hope my son knows.

I hope he feels he is part of something bigger than himself. That’s cliché, I know. But I don’t mean part of an organization. Or a mission. I mean something deeper. To really feel the pulse of life in his veins. To know he is a descendant of a story older than time.

Not just to be in nature
but to feel himself as nature.
And to trust the spontaneity of that nature.

I hope he lives in the presence of the mystery of life.

I hope alarm bells ring when he’s approached by people who are overly confident in things human beings have no business being supremely confident about. That he recognizes just how many unanswered questions there are.

I hope that presence of mystery doesn’t feel like a burden to him
but like something exciting
inviting
entrancing.

That he senses a kind of beyondness to the mystery.
Something so far out.
In the outer reaches, beyond what we might call ordinary knowledge.

But also that he feels its nearness.
That we are a breathing representation of the mystery.
That we are that mystery awakened.
Living question marks
wondering about wondering.

I hope he recognizes how fleeting life is.
But that the ephemeral nature of it doesn’t inspire an urgency that causes him to race past the rose garden.
I hope that the shortness of life instead inspires a desire to more deeply inhale the things typically considered mundane.
That each day feels ripe with riches.
Riches that could easily pass him by
if he weren’t so attuned
and attentive.

I hope he knows that the most important things in life are not the things that can be bought. Those things can only be cultivated.

I hope he harnesses his gifts.
And feels the electricity of his talents
moving hearts and minds.

I hope he can sense the truth of his uniqueness.
That he is a one-time-only magic spell of the universe.
And I hope he can see that same truth in the eyes of others too.

I hope he feels the love I have for him.
The love his mother has for him.
And I hope the sweet ache of that love is something he learns to pass on.

I hope he remembers that he came into this world beautiful and whole.
And that no matter what the world says,
that is how he will leave it.

Beautiful and whole.

The Daily Newsletter for Intellectually Curious Readers

Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.

🛝 Strange Thing About Adulthood

Take note of this this little exchange I found during some web surfing this week:

Internet stranger #1 wrote:

“The strange part about adulthood that no one talks about is that we're all homesick for a place & time that no longer exists and we'll never be able to visit again.”

To which internet stranger #2 replied:

“Yes. But also, realize that now YOU can create that sense of home and peace and joy for OTHER people who will one day remember it fondly. And you will find new joy and purpose in that pursuit, which will dull the pain of moving on in life and missing these times and people. Sometimes we can get too attached to the past and miss out on what we could be doing now and who we could be impacting the way these people impacted us. Just something I've been thinking about lately.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Polyphony is a type of music that involves two or more independent melodic lines played or sung simultaneously, creating a rich and complex sound. It is distinct from monophony, which features a single melodic line, and homophony, where one main melody is supported by chords.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

Alternative Human Nature: Why Kindness and Cooperation are More Natural Than Selfishness

“For a long time, there has been a general assumption in our culture that “human nature” is essentially bad. Human beings — so it has been assumed — are strongly disposed to traits like selfishness, domination, and warfare. We have powerful natural impulses to compete with one another for resources, and to try to accumulate power and possessions. If we are kind, it’s usually because we have ulterior motives. If we are good, it’s only because we have managed to control and transcend our natural selfishness and brutality.

This view of human nature has been justified by biological theories like the “selfish gene” (as popularised by the UK science writer Richard Dawkins) and the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology describes how present-day human traits developed in prehistoric times, during what is termed the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). The EEA is usually seen as a period of intense competition, when life was a kind of Roman gladiatorial battle in which only the traits that gave people a survival advantage were selected, and all others fell by the wayside.

For example, evolutionary psychologists have suggested that men have a strong urge to gain wealth and power because, in prehistoric times, this enhanced their chances of survival and increased their reproductive possibilities (1). Others have suggested that human beings have such a strong impulse to fight wars because prehistoric tribes of genetically similar people were in constant competition for resources with other groups (2). Similarly, racism has been seen as an adaptation that developed because altruism towards another group would have decreased a group’s own chances of survival. It was beneficial to deprive other groups of resources and power in order to increase our own access to them. In the words of Pascal Boyer, for example, racism is “a consequence of highly efficient economic strategies”, enabling us to “keep members of other groups in a lower-status position, with distinctly worse benefits” (3).

All of this may seem logical. But in fact the assumption these views are based on — that prehistoric life was a competitive struggle for survival — is completely false.”

🎬 Endnote

How was this issue?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That's it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

P.S. Want to help support this newsletter? Check out this list of similar newsletters that DTRH readers also love.