>>7690364

"Drinking the Kool-aid" is originally a reference to the Jonestown massacre which took place in Guyana about 35 years ago. A group of religious separatists/cultists all drank from a tank of Kool-aid that had been laced with poison, at the behest of the leadership. So the literal and original context is suicide, or being led to suicide.

However, in American usage, "drinking the kool-aid" has also come to mean signing on with what the user wishes to describe as a crazy or unattractive idea: the wrong political party, the wrong cause, etc. We could easily describe pink-haired SJWs has having "drunk the kool-aid" of leftism, as one example. To drink the kool-aid signals both /true belief/ on the drinker's part, but is also to be duped into doing something that will ultimately destroy the person, the state, whatever's important in the discussion. It is this notion of "true believers" which is closest to your rabbit hole thing (if going down the rabbit hole means learning the truth).

However, the rabbit hole thing was also used famously by Morpheus in the original Matrix movie, and so Carroll's phrase also has contemporary associations with "Taking The Red Pill".

Or better yet, let's repair to the original text, which is Alice (Adventures) in Wonderland: the rabbit hole is also a source of multiplying confusion, of going away from the surface world into something strange, a Wonderland. A bit later, Alice (apparently, I have not read the book) says "Curiouser and Curiouser!"

Alice is easy to conflate with Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, as both are girls who find themselves in strange new worlds. Furthermore, during the above matrix scene, a character indicates that "Kansas is goin' bye-bye." Therefore, if one is tumbling into a very confusing situatoin, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Just OTTOMH, I would also suggest watching Spirited Away, Labyrinth or reading the Narnia books for other examples of girls and young women (and young men) who are fantastically thrust into strange new circumstances.

>>7690364

Or if one finds oneself in a sticky situation, in American business contexts (I've been in board rooms where older men used the phrase frequently) being "in the tall weeds" indicates that you are in a tricky, tedious problem or set of problems, which have to be managed. Or you have to parse through lots of data which is not amenable to a simple discussion, which business-people hate. To be In The Tall Weeds, like the Rabbit Hole, is rooted in nature, but indicates a general confusion, which is the real commonality this time.