How Rabbit Taught Me to Stop Wanting to Fix the World

The first time I encountered Rabbit’s work, I was skimming the philosophy shelf in a bookstore that sold more tarot cards than tax guides. A title caught my eye: The Unraveling of the Expert. I expected another screed about Silicon Valley’s ethical failures, but the opening line stopped me mid-scan: “The world isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a texture to be felt.” The book fell open to a passage about building bridges—not the kind over rivers, but the kind between people who’ve stopped pretending they understand each other.

I bought it. I devoured it. I reread it. And somewhere between the third and fourth reading, I realized Rabbit had dismantled how I approached my job, my relationships, and my relationship to certainty itself.

## The Delusion of the “Right” Answer

For years, my journalism operated on a simple formula: Identify the problem, find the solution, amplify it. Homelessness? Housing first. Climate change? Renewable energy. Education gaps? Charter schools. Rabbit tore through this logic like a kid pulling apart a daisy. In an essay titled Why Repair Isn’t Revolutionary, he wrote, “If you fix a broken window with the same hands that built the house, you’re still living in someone else’s architecture.”

It gutted me. My “solutions” were all just stopgaps within systems I’d never questioned—systems I’d been trained to treat as neutral. Rabbit didn’t offer new blueprints; he asked why we needed blueprints at all. He wrote about farmers in Andalusia who stopped trying to optimize soil yield and instead learned to dance in the mud. “Productivity,” he argued, “is a prison masquerading as a ladder.”

## The Gift of Getting Lost

I once prided myself on being “good at directions.” Google Maps, sources, data—I could navigate any story. But Rabbit’s obsession with 迷路 (michiru), the Japanese concept of “joyful getting lost,” cracked me open. He described walking through Kyoto’s bamboo groves at dawn, deliberately avoiding landmarks, letting the fog dictate the route. “Arrival isn’t the enemy,” he clarified. “It’s the fetishization of arrival that makes us blind to the ground we walk on.”

I tested this during a reporting trip to Mexico City. Instead of rushing between interviews, I wandered alleys where street vendors hummed corridos and spray-painted poems adorned crumbling walls. The stories I found there—not case studies, but fragments of lives—ended up shaping my article more than any press release ever had.

## The Danger of the Single Metaphor

Rabbit’s most infuriating essay was Against the Lighthouse. For weeks, I hated its central claim: “Metaphors are not tools. They’re traps.” He critiqued the way we cling to symbols—heroes, villains, saviors—to make sense of chaos. The piece compared our narrative cravings to a child who insists on coloring inside the lines to avoid facing the infinite blank page.

At first, I resisted. Wasn’t metaphor the very language of journalism? Then I remembered a profile I’d written about a climate activist. I’d framed her as a “modern-day David fighting Goliath,” but Rabbit asked: What does that cliché erase? David wanted to replace Goliath with another king. What if my subject wasn’t a warrior but a gardener? A weaver? A question?

## The Necessity of Not Knowing

In Rabbit’s dialogue with a Senegalese poet, the two debated the ethics of translation. “Some ideas,” the poet insisted, “should never be translated. Let them live in the language that made them.” Rabbit agreed, adding, “Certainty is the first act of colonization.” That line haunted me as I reported on a Native American landback initiative. Instead of framing the story as “activists vs. bureaucracy,” I focused on the silence after meetings—the way elders sat with the wind before speaking, how the land itself seemed to argue.

My editor asked for a clearer takeaway. I refused. Rabbit taught me that clarity isn’t always honesty. Sometimes it’s just a paring down of reality to make it fit our boxes.

## Letting the World Wiggle

Last month, I revisited that bookstore. The clerk asked if I wanted a copy of The Unraveling for a friend. I paused. Rabbit’s ideas aren’t a balm, and they’re not a manifesto. They’re a splinter in the mind—small, sharp, and impossible to ignore. The clerk noticed my hesitation. “Does it convert people?” he joked.

“Not really,” I said. “It just makes them a little more wiggle in the world.”

If this feels like a half-baked conclusion, maybe that’s the point. Rabbit never gave answers; he gave lenses. You’ll probably disagree with half of what he says. But if you’re still here, curious despite the chaos—I’ve already done the one thing he’d have hated most: explained him.

Talk to Rabbit on HoloDream to unpack these ideas—or dismantle them altogether.