When Alice’s Rabbit Hole is a Hamster Wheel
By: Colleen Seki
I have a confession — I fall down rabbit holes too easily.
I sit down intending to rest, maybe turn on a TV show or open up a book. Two hours later and I’ve watched maybe 10 minutes of the show, but I’m on the 18th page of the search results on some topic so tangentially related to my original question that I can barely remember where I started. My download folder has multiple new additions, and I have more tabs open than I can count. Article after article, link after link, the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper.
We discuss declining cognitive endurance and shortened attention spans in our students, but what happens when our own curiosity becomes almost pathological? Am I resting, learning, procrastinating, working, or a mix of everything?
When my colleague told me about this call for contributions, I unsettlingly realized that I genuinely don’t know what “rest” means in practice. Many attuned teachers become experts at task switching and perpetual vigilance, so much so it often spreads to private life. Passive idleness and meditation are not a part of my repertoire. This led me to an intriguing question: Can intellectual curiosity itself constitute a form of rest? Down the rabbit hole I went.
First, a literature review on whether epistemic curiosity can coexist with rest. The deeper I went, the bigger the questions became. Existential questions. Personal questions. Is learning only valuable if it produces something measurable (hello research publication requirements and professional development!)? Are we only legitimizing curiosity if it results in publications, presentations, grants, and other visible products? Could compulsive browsing be a manifestation of avoidance or identity maintenance? Articles on autotelic activities. Implications of inquisitiveness. I accumulated PDFs and links in carefully sorted folders, all to be read “eventually.” Oh, the lies we tell ourselves!
At this point, I realized I had fallen down the rabbit hole directly onto a hamster wheel. My research pile grew increasingly impressive as I logged miles (or kilometers!) of reading without advancing or producing a single written paragraph. The more calories I burned on citations and the faster I chased my sources, the farther the first sentence of my draft seemed to recede in the distance.
Alice descended, explored, transformed, and eventually emerged with a story. Academia doesn’t lend itself well to having a clear “door” for the beginning and ending of our pursuits. How many of us teach during the day, research in the evenings, and spend our weekends learning new things?
Frankly, I like learning. I don’t pressure myself to do it; at this point it is simply automatic. Yet I often feel as though I’m endlessly running, and it isn’t necessarily refreshing. Trapped in my hamster wheel, with conventional wisdom saying rest is “disengaging” and academia saying learning must produce something tangible, I expend endless effort without evidence of any movement. Caught between these expectations, I began to wonder whether I was failing to rest at all. I don’t know if I can grant myself the freedom to explore without needing to justify what it might eventually produce.
After weeks of multiple drafts going in a dozen different directions for this article, I finally had an epiphany. Rest to me is simply the restoration of something that has been depleted. Perpetual exhaustion can masquerade as productivity. So rather than asking what counts as rest, I began asking a different question: When was the last time I felt truly rested?
My answer surprised me. Sorting through old files, I rediscovered an unfinished reflection I made after the JASAL 2025 National Conference. My working title was painfully simple: “CATHARSIS.” A single residual question from that experience succinctly ties into this opportune call for “rest” reflections: How could a few hours in an Irish pub after an academic conference leave me feeling more rested, inspired, and motivated than years of intentional reflection and research?
Academia hasn’t been fun for me in years, and yet that conference reignited something. My battery was drained, my cup was empty, and I was the human embodiment of the spinning loading wheel. Processing, processing. In that Irish pub I discovered rest. Former colleagues, old office mates, new acquaintances, and long-unseen friends all converged in the same room. New polite handshakes mixed with old familiar bear hugs. Alcohol flowed, conversation flowed, but so too did warmth, connection, camaraderie, and belonging. Despite the physical and mental exhaustion, the travel, and long hours, I left feeling refreshed. Rested. This felt like home.
Looking back, I realized that I was depleted in ways I hadn’t recognized. I needed belonging, validation, shared identity, professional recognition, continuity of self, and simple friendship. None of these were things I could do on my own or provide for myself, nor had I experienced them recently. No wonder I felt so nourished afterwards.
This experience led me to a tentative conclusion: just like there might be different “love languages,” perhaps each of us has a different “rest language.” Rest in its most basic form is getting back whatever is currently missing. For some, that might mean solitude, meditation, or passive entertainment. For others, it may involve creativity, intellectual exploration, or social connections. Apparently in my case it involves old friends in an Irish pub in Beppu.
I never did publish that conference commentary. Like many in academia, I had countless other responsibilities competing for my attention. But that doesn’t mean the experience lacked value.
Despite the modern academic condition encouraging us to value visible products of our time, intellectual and personal growth tends to be invisible and is often nonlinear and cumulative. Perhaps the rabbit hole and the hamster wheel are not opposites after all.
Years spent seemingly running in place, exploring, reading, learning, making connections, searching, expanding, and maintaining curiosity may appear unproductive from the outside. After all, Alice returns from a rich and transformative journey of discovery with a marvelous story, while the hamster simply hasn’t gone anywhere at all. In that way, the difference might not be the effort itself, but whether we eventually carry something meaningful back.
Today, it was a reflection on “rest”; tomorrow, who knows?
At the very least, if I have spent years “resting” by running on an intellectual hamster wheel, I can only hope the hamster is absolutely shredded by now.
Colleen SEKI is a hypervigilant insomniac and professional wearer of multiple hats: university lecturer, licensed preschool and kindergarten educator, bilingual learning advisor, avid researcher.