The 5 Forces Erasing Wonder From Your World | Ep. 1

In this first episode of Where Wonder Went, I reflect on five years of publishing my newsletter Down the Rabbit Hole  and why I decided to launch this new podcast. I explore the central question behind the series: where did our sense of wonder go? Drawing from my own journey as a sleight of hand magician and curator of wonderful things, I share why wonder often fades as we grow older, the five forces behind its erasure, and why I believe rediscovering it is essential for living with reverence and aliveness.

This episode sets the stage for the conversations and explorations to come as I invite you to join me in the practice of re-enchantment and in finding the extraordinary hidden in everyday life.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on other platforms.

Welcome to episode one of Where Wonder Went. I am Mike Slavin. If you're listening to this, you probably found this through the newsletter, Down the Rabbit Hole, and this pod interview series show, whatever label we want to apply to it, is the next wave of wonder that I am unfurling into the world. The day this is getting published, it will have been five years since I started Down the Rabbit Hole—five years, every single week, publishing that little window into wonder.

If you're familiar, you already know. Every week I send at least three links, an image of the week designed to incite awe, a word you should learn to help see the world a little bit differently, some passages, some of my own writing, some writing from people I admire. And this has been an exercise for me to continually return back to the exploration of wonder. Wonder has been something I have been kind of obsessed with for a long time, well over 10 years. You might even be able to say more than 20.

When I was 13 years old, I became a sleight of hand magician. It's something that's still near and dear to my heart, and it's shaped the way I view a lot of the world, and I'm sure I'm going to dive into the nuances of that sort of magician's worldview as time moves on. But this has been a question—a set of questions really—that have lived closely to my heart. Increasingly and more intensely, I have the feeling that the drought of wonder that seems to afflict us in contemporary living is something that I want to do more to turn the tide on.

The newsletter is a great exercise, but to speak and to share off the cuff more at the edge of my thinking, and to have the ability to dive deeper and to invite you as a reader, now listener, to know me a little bit more intimately—that is the sort of initial overview here.

More than that, I want to double click on this name: Where Wonder Went. I'm asking that question, you know, where did it go? And I've got some good insight into that, and I think I'm going to discover more as I just go about the process of articulating my answer to that question. But this is what I'm going to be exploring, and the way to begin to think about this question, I think, is to consider this: the world of wonder is the world that we're born into, and the sense of wonder that we experience has a magical quality to existence as children. The things that we encounter—there's this great sense of firstness to everything and a deep inquisitiveness that we have towards the world around us.

As time progresses and we grow up, that experience begins to wither away. And for a lot of people it evaporates entirely, or at least that's how they feel from inside, from the interiority of their experience. The sense of wonder has—it feels like it has completely left them. And so I want to sort of do some archeology or cartography. I want to make maps and I want to excavate the fossils of wonder and bring them back to our life.

So this isn't solely about asking the question, but to use what we discover as tinder for reigniting the flame of wonder in our lives so that we might engage with ordinary living in a way that carries more reverence and appreciation and freshness and aliveness, and on and on.

So let me begin to articulate something to you. This is one of the ways I've come to think about it. There is a professor named Craig Chalquist—where he teaches escapes me—but he talks about a mythic structure that I think is important to this conversation. You hear a lot about the hero's journey, but something that I've talked about in the newsletter a few times is the journey of re-enchantment. And one of the things he describes is that at a certain point in life you find your way back to the magic door. And through that magic door, you can re-encounter the world with the eyes of wonder, familiar to you from when you were a child, and the solidness and the fixedness and the certainties of life—the false certainties that we hold onto as a sort of mechanism—begin to wash away, and the mystery and the brilliance of life begins to flood back into us.

So encountering that magic door—this is something, one way I've begun to think about it is: when we had to leave, if the magic door exists for us to rediscover, there was a period of time where we left it behind. And I want to think about this in terms of a rope that we actually tied to the knob of the door so that we might return to it someday. And what has happened over time is that that rope that we tied to us—if you imagine it as a bundle of threads that are pulled together—over time, different forces have come with their shears, with their scissors, with their blade, and severed aspects of this rope.

One of the ways you can see it pretty pronounced is the severing that happens in the American education system. Now, I'm not going to assume everyone who listens to this is American, and maybe your education system is different. I don't have much context outside of the American education system, but there is a stomping down on the sense of wonder that occurs inside of the American education system. It very clearly isn't an inflaming of the sense of wonder. It is—even not even a sense of curiosity is inflamed in many cases. And the difference between curiosity and wonder is something that we'll explore in the future because there are differences there. But they are very much related.

You start to see that the education system stomps out this sense, this feeling, and that is such a shame because that institution should really feel like it fosters that, right? And here and there you might have these bastions of wonder who are teachers, who are sort of the glitch in the code, who really enable and allow for the fostering and the cultivating of that sense of wonder in a student that helps keep that flame burning a little longer. But more often than not, that's not the case. It's about recitation, it's about rote memorization. And there is an overconfidence in the things that we know and an under-appreciation of the mysterious and the way that the mysterious is folded into our daily lives. So if you can imagine that rope beginning to start to get sheared, you have that piece that severs us.

The other places that you can look, related to the education system, is the world of science. Now, it's very important that as I begin to articulate these coming points that you understand that these are nuanced perspectives and I'm not talking about the entirety of the enterprise of science. Obviously, the enterprise of science is extremely valuable and useful and beautiful and has contributed a great deal to our world. But there is a way that people relate to the enterprise of science that is completely misguided.

The true spirit of science should be one that is iterative and exists in the context of all that is unknown, and there is so much of it that is unknown. You learn about the turnings of the wheel and the paradigm shifts that occur in science. And too often people forget that we are standing on scientific foundations that will be undermined by future discoveries. This is the very nature of science. And so you see these strands of scientism that occur in people who want to use science as a way to justify their beliefs. Or it even occurs in people who practice science, whether they're professors as an institution or researchers, whatever they may be. They feel that it almost gives them a priesthood—not in terms of moral purity, but in terms of status above others—that they have access to the truth in a way that common folk do not. And in very specific ways they might, but that truth is always so tenuous and always subject to revision as more is discovered.

But so often the relationship to science is that so much has been settled and so much has been clarified that science basically—we've figured out so much about the world. And this misses the mystery in it. One of the ways I've described this in the past is that science does a great job of mapping the motion of a mystery, but its ability to explain that mystery is wholly insufficient for the instrument that it is. It cannot do that. And I think too often we allow for the mapping of the motion of the mystery. We look at our ability to name and label things and develop these very rigorous and systematic frameworks for describing the world. We forget that the thing that we're describing is still extremely mysterious to us.

Another way of putting this: I think it was Richard Feynman who said that his father—I'll have to make sure I'm not spouting off something that is inaccurate here, but I'm pretty sure that his father was in the woods with him one time, and they were listening for the bird sounds and he was pointing out all the different names of the birds to Richard, to his son. And after he had gone and done this, he made a point to Richard that now that he knows all of the names of these birds, he still knows nothing about them, right? And so this is a sort of related idea that just because we have labels for things does not mean that we have arrived at some sort of deep understanding of them.

And so I think so often science is used to sort of communicate that so many of the facts are settled when a true scientist knows just how mysterious the world is. You know, I was speaking with someone recently who is a professor of—he's like a radio engineer or something—but electromagnetism is something that he is aware of. And we were able to kind of get down on the level of just how incredible it is that this force is present and how strange that basic fact is. This basic strangeness, I feel like, is often missed.

If you are seduced by the scientific establishment's ability to claim it has a monopoly on truth or that the truth claims that its process surfaces—it's like putting an anchor, or not an anchor, but fishing some things out from the ocean and being able to study those things, but then assuming that you have a great catalog of the ocean when you just have a catalog of the things you've been able to extract from it. One way I've said this before is you can squeeze juice from the fruit and analyze that juice, but do you know about the fruit? You know, there's so much that is missed.

So this is another way that our connection to wonder gets sheared because we feel that, well, these very sensible and smart and intelligent people have figured out a lot. And so if they don't find wonder in the world around them, then perhaps I should not. And really great scientific minds—there's famous quotes from Albert Einstein about the mystery of life. Richard Feynman has one about diving into the details of a flower and these types of things. So this is not—again, these are not totalizing statements—but this is something that I have noticed in the world, that the scientific enterprise can be used to blunt our sense of wonder when really the sense of wonder is so vital and important, an aspect to motivate scientific discovery. It is absolutely essential for that process to unfold where we lay down our certainties and explore at the edges of the unknown.

So we've clipped off multiple threads here of our rope: education, the scientific establishment. Another one that is worth considering is religion and the religious establishment. Well, establishments—obviously it's not singular here. But you have these dynamics where the way of relating to religion is not as an interface for encountering mystery, but as an organized set of complete predictions about the nature of the world. And this is a mistake. And this, just similarly to the scientific establishment—the true religious person does not feel this way about it.

There are things you could talk about, like the apophatic ways of knowing God or the via negativa and these types of things. Really, they bring a lot of humility to religious inclination and do not allow for the mystery to be extinguished. It really forces the issue of that which can be unknown, the unknowables in relationship to what you might describe as God.

So you do have these people who are—there's a trash truck here. I'm wondering if this recording is going to pick it up, but we're going to move forward one way or another as we continue to take out the trash that is crippling our sense of wonder in today's culture.

So you have this thing with religion where it puts people in this position where they're holding these propositional beliefs about the world and considering things are settled in a way that they're not. And it can really cause someone to fall out of wonder in a way that I think would be counter to the great religious figures and what their intention was. Now I can't speak universally about that because I am not a religious scholar and I'm sure there are cases where teachers are—this wouldn't be super important to them. But I can feel confident that a sense of wonder would be an outgrowth of a true Christian believer or a Buddhist or even a Taoist. As well as, like, a Vedanta, Hinduism and these types of things, which I have only briefly encountered.

But there are ways of accessing those frames of reference, and the way that those belief systems inspire relationship to the world can be very much a source of wonder. It does not need to extinguish it. But you do have fundamentalism and you have these control structures that become—that wear the face of religion and end up severing us from these things, causing us to no longer want to ask questions because we fear our questions will lead us to eternal damnation or we will be exiled by our families and these types of things. And obviously, that is going to extinguish our ability to surf the mystery. So this is another way that things get sheared off.

Now, there is the necessity for growth. Human development—this is a very important thing that is kind of an inescapable. Some of these others I've mentioned, you could form the institutions or more perfect the institution so that the extinguishing of wonder was less prominent. This next one is kind of built into the way of things, but I do think that there is a way of relating to it where it need not entirely extinguish wonder.

And it is: we have to eventually become capable of providing for ourselves in the world. We need to find a place outside of the canopy of our parents' protection or our guardians' protection, and that comes at some point. And this causes us to—we have to narrow in the sphere of our attention. We have to become more focused on being able to provide a specific kind of value and be able to put attention on caring for ourselves and all that goes into organizing a life in a way where we cannot enjoy the wide open exploration that is available to us in our youth, where that exploration is being subsidized by the energies and efforts of those older than us who are tasked with caring for us and stewarding our development.

So that is what happens and we grow, and we have to find our way. And that way requires a narrowing and a figuring out of how to provide for ourselves. This is where a lot of people get stuck because they become so focused on their work life. Life becomes about just survival, you know, especially if you cannot get to a place where you feel like you have the capability, or the opportunities have never met you in a place where you could bring your capability to those opportunities in such a way you felt like you weren't just treading water, if not drowning, right?

And if you're in that state, it's really hard to find that sense of wonder because you're in survival mode, you know. And there's all kinds of physiological closures that are going to happen that are going to narrow your perception and make it harder for you to wonder and experience a deeper inquiry into the mystery of being, right? These aren't things we think about if we're worried about our next meal. So this is the kind of thing that will also begin to cut at that rope of wonder.

And so, I mean, I could go on and on here. I think the last one I will sort of leave with is a general cultural sentiment towards wonder as the thing of child's play, a general cultural sentiment towards relating to the magic in the world as cringe or, you know, that of course it's not real. It's like be practical, grow up, you know. These ideas, sort of as independent of these other things that I've mentioned, they're kind of marching orders you get from society at large of how you should relate as an adult and what do adults care about. And it's time to put the things of childhood away and be a grownup.

So I have spent a lot of time thinking about: Okay, but I can be a grownup, right? I can be someone who takes care of my life and I have my needs taken care of. And I have—I've developed the skills necessary to basically replace my parents as my caregivers. I've built up this inner caregiver to a sufficient degree where my inner child is still able to play, right?

I feel like people are sold a false trade where—and this is very much related to my prior point as well—where you have your child and then you sell off your inner child to become your own caregiver. When that's a false deal. The whole idea is to become a sufficient enough caregiver where your inner child still has room to play and to explore the world, right? It's not an easy thing to do. That is the path of adulthood. But the idea that you can only have one is extremely limiting.

And I think even in cases where people have the capability of bringing their inner child out to play, they do not do so out of fear of being ridiculed or mocked because that is not what you do as an adult, right? This is—our innate sense of magic, a reverential curiosity to the world, the humility in the face of this grand mystery that we're all embedded in—in a lot of ways it's not in vogue. It's not what you attend to. So there's that sort of broader cultural pressure that people feel where even if they had the opportunity to more deeply embrace a sense of wonder, they avoid it out of fear of losing status.

So we have to be willing to take a ding in status to recapture this sense of wonder. And probably, if people do not want you to feel that sense of wonder around you or be judgmental of you if you were embodying and seeing the world with that sort of freshness, then they probably aren't people that you really want to be around all that much. They are definitely not people you want to influence how you are—something so foundational as the way you see the world.

And in fact, perhaps the courageous thing to do here and the thing that you're being asked to do is to be a bastion of wonder in a way. By embracing it, you might invite them—where their initial reaction may be judgment—to invite them to come into this sense of wonder by witnessing your example. And what a beautiful thing that would be.

I think all of this stuff is important because I have a newborn son. I found this stuff important before I had a newborn son, but it feels especially important now because as his caretaker—I became a caregiver for myself and now I am learning to become a caregiver for him—to be able to create that canopy of protection while also being able to invite my inner child out to play, to play with him inside of that canopy rather than just being the sturdy tree trunk that offers him shade. To be able to play and to access that sense of wonder in myself, I think is really important for him to have an early experience of that sense of wonder being reaffirmed and engaged, and to the degree that it will stay with him and he'll be able to access it later in life.

So we've talked about five different pieces that shear this rope that we've tied to the magic door in hopes that we can trace our way back as we have to march out into the world. These are the things that are standing—they're the Edward Scissorhands of wonder erasure. And we're talking about the education system, scientific establishment, religious fundamentalism, the pressures of providing for yourself, the cultural status game that you may be concerned with. And if you have all five of these things basically chopping at you and then cutting that rope, you may feel that your sense of wonder has been completely severed and there's no way back. How can you find your way back?

And I want to offer that even if you've encountered all these things and you've experienced all these things, that there is a fiber—the sort of golden fiber that lives at the center of the rope—that still remains tied to the doorknob of the magic door. And it's so thin that you can hardly see it, but it is there. And it is so difficult to spot that it's hard for the forces of culture to try to cut it, right?

This is a message of hope. And this is a message that despite what pressures the world might have applied to you, there are ways back to the door. And essentially that is the spirit of this podcast. It is finding the thin golden fiber that is connecting you back to that magic door and following it so that you might reconnect with your childlike sense of wonder, and such that your childlike sense of wonder can mature and bloom into a grownup sense of wonder in your daily life inside of ordinary living as you tackle your responsibilities, as you go to work, as you care for those who need your care, and as you explore the edges of your capabilities and grow into more. Our sense of wonder is a vital asset for us as we do all of those things.

So that is the spirit of this, and that was a very long kind of intro into it, but I hope that that is useful and interesting to you. And I am very much excited and exploring this, and I'm going to have conversations with some people. I would like to invite you, the listener, to ask questions directly that I can answer—sort of do a Q&A type episode. And I have a lot to say on the subject, and it feels like—the newsletter Down the Rabbit Hole will go on, absolutely, after five years, and I have no intentions of stopping. But I wanted to have a venue for deeper dives, and that's what this is.

So with all that said, I want to pivot a moment to acknowledge something, because this is coming out the day after the five year anniversary of Down the Rabbit Hole, as I mentioned in the beginning of the episode. But that day coincides with another day in a weird twist of fate. Down the Rabbit Hole was born on the same day that someone very important to me died. And that person was my grandmother.

She died 40 days shy of 103 years old, and she was a remarkable woman who really impressed upon me a basic inherent sense of goodness that I could not shake—meaning that it was a sense of goodness that lived in me, that was a part of the very fiber of my being. And this is something that I carry with me. It's something that is so much a part of who I am. And it's been five years now since she's gone, and I've struggled to know how to properly honor her memory.

I felt that I wanted to do something very grand to honor her memory and just do something that really allows for people to understand just how deeply she loved me and how deeply I loved her. And as time has moved on, I feel that it is not some single tribute that would possibly satisfy. It will be a matter of how I live my life and how I take the gift that she gave me and use it to create gifts for others.

So I wanted to take a moment to honor her. Her name was Maisie. And she believed in me and she loved me very deeply, and I was given the great honor of being the last to speak at her funeral. And I had this vivid memory of feeling—I saw her in the casket and my initial reaction was almost like confusion. I felt that maybe they got the wrong body because so much of it was like she was not there. It was just the flesh, and whatever was animating her was clearly no longer present, so much so that it didn't even remind me of her, oddly enough.

So this experience was to speak on her behalf and to share real raw emotion, I think—where I grew up, it is not extremely common for men to share grief, to cry, to show that side of themselves. And if they're doing it, to do it in a way where it does not come with some shame attached, where they feel bad about their grief, where they feel like they've done something wrong or that their tears are somehow something to be ashamed of. And I do not feel that way, and especially not tears shed for someone who was as remarkable as my grandmother.

So I was very much grateful to be able to be someone who could stand there and grieve publicly and visibly. Because I think that's such an important thing for us to be able to occupy. And I think grief has a very interesting relationship to wonder, in that when we lose something, especially something precious to us, especially something profound, I think it wakes us up. It can wake us up. This does not always happen, but it wakes us up to all that it is that we have, all of the gifts that are present in our life that easily become just familiar and that we gloss over. Because when we lose something so precious to us, it just draws us to the preciousness and the fragility of life. It connects us with how fragile it all is and how beautiful that we get to have these experiences that we get to share and that we get to participate in life itself.

And so I have found a deep desire to love the world and in the way that my grandmother loved me, and to give that gift to others. And so sometimes our way to the magic door can occur through a great rupture that we might think at the time is an unimaginable tragedy. And we're all going to surf through tragedy in our life—very intimate, personal tragedy. And I think that the encounters with those moments really can wake us up to the world that we're living in and the way that things can become ossified in their categorizations and the way that we kind of feel like we know what things are can get shaken up a bit. And we can start to become more inquisitive and become more willing to relate to things not as things, but as other participants in this great mystery.

So I wanted to take some moment to honor Maisie's memory. And I am left with a task for myself. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to record a conversation I had with her before she passed. This was well before she passed. This was a couple years. But I am a bit of a personal archivist. I have videos from my childhood. I had a camcorder. I've tried to record different moments throughout my life because I do have this sense that so much of this is passing us by and so much of it is over before we know it, right?

So I had this conversation with her, which has been a beautiful thing to listen to in my own grief process, to reconnect with those moments now that she's gone and to think back on these conversations. Because I used to sit down and sit across from her and we would talk for a good while—an hour, a couple hours—because I would frequently visit her when I was a child. And after I moved away, I would come back and see her and we would have these discussions where we're just sitting across from one another and talking.

And I recorded one of these conversations, which I'm glad I had the presence of mind to do that. But the sort of task that I have for myself is I have a laptop that, as much as from what I can tell, has been fried, that I do not know if anything on the hard drive is remaining. And I actually have a separate conversation, very brief conversation that I recorded in an interaction with her that ended up—I didn't realize it would be, but it was the last conversation I had with her and it was the last time that we exchanged "I love you"s.

And the sad thing is, I don't know if this recording is still around. So I am going to see if it is. I'm going to take this laptop that has been sitting in my closet for five years, not operational, just with the hope that one day I might do something about this. And I'm going to see if I can't recover that file. Because that would be something good to have, not only for myself, but as a legacy project for my son, to have another window into this woman and her voice and the love that she had.

So with all that said, I think that is a pretty good jumping off point here. The next episode will involve a good friend of mine, Dan Garfield, who—we have a nice, fun conversation about a lot of these elements, about wonder and his experience of wonder. He has lots of interesting takes that I think you'll appreciate. He's one of my favorite conversational partners in real life, and I look forward to sharing that with you and much more moving forward.

So I will keep you posted on how things develop. And I would like to do a Q&A type episode here at some point in the near future. If you made it this far, thank you so much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a reader of Down the Rabbit Hole. I so deeply appreciate it. And if you found anything in here useful or valuable or you have deeper questions, you can always reply to Down the Rabbit Hole. I read every email. I might not be able to reply to every email, but I read every email. And it's always a joy to hear from people I might be impacting.

So thank you so much. And with that, I will sign off from episode one of Where Wonder Went. Thank you.