🌀🐇 #288 hypercurious, internet rabbit holes, sea fans

Plus The Courage to Be Yourself

April 01, 2026

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧠 The Hypercurious Mind: ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information. Read it here.

🙉 The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul. Read it here.

🌀 Explore Internet Rabbit Holes: Cloudhiker is like a random button for interesting pieces of internet. Try it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

By Angelo Richardson: “The steady trade winds and the waves they produce, make the rugged northeast coast of the island of Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, a true beachcombers paradise. These sea fans are one of the most common jewels you can find there along the beach. I dipped one into the sea and photographed the waves crashing on the rocks through it. The tiny seawater lenses captured a different view of that same moment.”

🥸 Venn Diagram Vision

There's an affliction I've dubbed "Venn Diagram Vision" that causes a person to live in a chronic state of compare and contrast.

Everything they experience is referenced against an image in their mind about how things should be.

This is certainly is a useful capacity to cultivate but is certainly not an appropriate way of life.

Here's why:

When we take the experience we're having and overlay a multi-dimensional set of mental measuring sticks, we push ourselves one step (or more) away from life.

The disposition towards the moment becomes not embracing what is, but focusing on what isn't.

The most torturous thing about it is that this endless sizing up of things will not end even if we managed to arrive at a reality that perfectly matches up with our vision.

By that point, we will have created a new vision and we will use that to compare our once dream, now life, against.

Never quite arriving.

Pursuits of personal growth and spiritual advancement can cultivate tendencies that make us hyperaware of all the ways they can be better.

This is done with good intentions. How can we grow if you aren't aware of the ways we need to grow?

And finding ourselves making progress can be a pretty sweet high.

But this mental pattern run amok can terrorize us to the point we live in a state where all we see are the fixes that need to be made.

This can disconnect us from the beauty and richness of being alive.

The moment begins to feel intolerable in the presence of all the flaws.

This isn't growth. It's erosion.

We try to source our motivation from the brief highs we get from small steps of progress rather than a pervading nourishment that can be accessed in the here & now.

This can lead to burnout, breakdowns, and bouts of depression.

If we're growing a garden, we have to water our plants and pull the weeds.

Sometimes we are so fixated on the horizon that the garden of our lives begins to wither away.

So if you're stuck in hyperawareness of ways you can be better, you must practice the opposite:

Wanting what's right in front of you.

Take off the goggles of Venn diagram vision and embrace what is.

Love the world as it is. Love yourself as you are.

This is one of the most significant things you can do.

✨ Trees and Stars

Ponder this reminder from Tolkien:

“You look at trees and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Aduantas: An Irish word that describes the angst that comes with being in an unfamiliar place and among unfamiliar people

🕸️ From Around The Web

Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist

“One of the most important things that’s ever happened to me was by accident.

Years ago, I attended a meditation retreat during a tough time. I had just broken up with a co-founder and a girlfriend in the same week and gone from two jobs to no jobs in a day. The retreat was supposed to help. It didn’t. I injured my knee trying to sit still, and I had three migraines in eight days. Worst of all was my self-critical looping. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do it right, then frustrated at the frustration, then frustrated at that.

On the last day, desperate, I broke my promise to practice only as instructed and changed the technique. Almost immediately, my latest stress headache went away. Four hours later, tears rolled down my face, something between bliss and relief that I had little reference for.

The instructors told me to ignore it. “States come and go,” they said. “Don’t get attached.”

But I had no choice. I suspected such a peak experience in an otherwise dark time was a fluke. But what if it wasn’t?”

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin