I'm not sure how to craft an interlocutory response to both of your recent emails out of the notes I made to myself as I read and thought about the 'no red pill' and 'surface acting' texts. Rabbit holes and Barnumism and self-criticism around struggles with right-action, right-livelihood, etc. seem to be the essence, so I think I'll transcribe from the yellow pads, adding bits as I think of them and trying not to unduly belabor the obvious.

The primary problem in engagement with High-Energy Metaphysics may be that it IS basically a head trip, self-gratifying and too-clever-by-half and, as you so insightfully note, reinforcing of shared-smarty-pants-ness, but of no actual USE to anybody. But I think that's largely harmless, something to be done with "a small number of like-minded friends" (as my 3rd grade report noted of my proclivities) and for basically aesthetic enjoyment. Let others engage with the dull realities they seem to find satisfaction in --World Series, big trucks, NASCAR, pledging allegiance. Let them even believe that they see straight through the mysteries. It can't diminish you, and you don't have to tolerate the boredom. It's a continuing challenge to find like-minded others willing and able to play, so that the speculations and amusing constructions are shared, and not just solitary onanisms that one may come to question the value and reality of. I've found a few such others over the years, Daniel is one, in the musical vein. Brad Fulton. Ken Stallcup. The other day I sent a link to Seneca Square Dance https://open.spotify.com/track/3R2gYim25KiXS11IaicXk8?si=011f36e1000f4970 to Brad, KNOWING that he'd be immediately in tune with its ineffability. He was.

As for today's 'mindfulness' example, I'm not sure where my "max leeriness" is focused: on the underlying "Applied Psych" model of how people work (in terms of the /measurability/ of (1) their level of 'mindfulness', and (2) their alleged coping strategy of 'surface acting' (a person who is actively mindful surely knows if they're practicing deception), or (3) on 'job performance' as a measure of anything meaningful, or (4) upon the seemingly obvious point that people being studied with such variables actually hate he job situations in which they find themselves, and the more 'mindful' they are, the more clearly they recognize that hatred. 'Mindful' people may "act out fake emotions" as they scan for avenues of escape from situations they abhor, but it's their discomfort with hateful situations that's at the core. The measurement of "job performance" or the anticipation of being measured by a phony corporate metric-- THAT's where the pain is.

Thus, "student evaluations" of a professor's teaching have always seemed to me FALSE --allegedly objective measures of something, but really a summation of totally subjective responses to an opportunity to reward or punish the prof.

Your concern with "compulsive article reading" that seems "addictive" looks to me like a mindful person trying to understand what exactly is distressing him in the situations he's immured by, hemmed in by. And seeking to respond to the situations with informed and principled actions. The Cabal cartoon seemed especially relevant just then, and I realize that I often resort to New Yorker cartoons as exemplars, in full-on smarty-pants mode. One wants, indeed vows, to operate honestly and consistently, not as if one is wearing a costume and a mask that would fool the bosses, or the rubes. I'm pretty sure that Abner Dean is the fons et origo: the realization that so many others are applying the coping strategy of falsifying/'surface acting' to get by, when the REAL problem is the falsity and dysfunctionality of the arena they're called upon to act in--in many cases, the JOB itself.

This is one version of the situation I fled at Acadia, and what projected me into Library School and a new career that wasn't so completely based on costume-and-mask of Academia. At W&L, I never had to pretend or feel that I was acting a role, always (with Popeye) could say "I yam what I yam".

My own version of the compulsive rabbit hole thing has been my lifelong reading habit, currently finding me revisiting the territory of world-system grand-scale processes that inform my understanding of how we got here, and observing yet again that the Emperor is self-deluding about his raiment. At the moment the inquiry is entangled with cotton and slavery and spices and Euro-American hubris and growth and capital, with a shifting heap of books past-and-revisited and present-and-being-digested. It's less an exploration of me-ness than yours seems to be of you-ness, but no less addictive and largely incomprehensible to the outside world, and no less necessary for mental health. And no less a basically solitary vice, with no clear product or public or potential. Of course I enjoy the luxury of not having to engage with costumes or masks, or earn $, so advice is not something I'm certified to offer. 

The Scarlet Suppository. Wonderful image.