Do you know what’s the most significant thing about Lewis Carroll’s Alice books? The void. The emptiness. The spaces where meaning isn’t. Just like your last performance review or that meditation app you downloaded but never used.

And he coded it in colors – specifically, the colors of playing cards and chess pieces. Because even in Wonderland, games need rules, pieces need positions, and cards need suits. These aren’t metaphors for people – they’re literal playing pieces in Carroll’s mathematical mind, symbols in his logical games. The red and black of a card deck, the red and white of Victorian chess pieces (yes, they used red instead of black back then – we’ll get to that). These are the building blocks of his nonsense universes, the pieces on his board.

The Only Color That Matters Is Red (Sound Familiar?)

Think about it. In Wonderland, you’ve got a deck of cards running everything. Playing cards are red and black suits on white backgrounds. But in Carroll’s world, only red has any power. The Queen of Hearts throws tantrums, the King of Hearts bumbles around, and soldiers paint white roses red because even flowers need to conform to the corporate dress code.

The black suits? They’re there, but they do nothing. They’re ignored. Void. Like your emails to HR.
The white background? It’s just space. Void again like your savings account.
Only red acts. Only red matters. Only red gets to send passive-aggressive company-wide messages.

It’s a lot like real life: Red gets angry, red makes the rules, and red shouts until everyone else falls in line. And what do black and white do? Black gets ignored, white gets bossed around, and neither one is allowed to unionize.

The Chess Game That Isn’t (But Still Somehow Controls Your Life)

Imagine a pantheon where the gods aren’t omnipotent beings but merely assigned different colored name tags. Red gets to command armies and devour sacrifices. White is forced to clean up after them. Black gets erased from the mythological record entirely. Now imagine that’s not mythology – that’s your office org chart.

Carroll’s Looking-Glass world runs on the same operating system. The chessboard world is “marked out just like a large chessboard,” but he never names the black squares. The white squares? They’re technically there but might as well be void, too – they’re just empty spaces where things happen. Like your dreams of being a professional dancer.

The Colors That Aren’t What They Seem (Just Like Your Career Path)

Alice might as well be one of the black cards in Wonderland – she exists, but it doesn’t matter. Just like those unmentioned spades and clubs, she’s treated as background furniture until someone needs something unpleasant done. Even at the trial, when she finally disrupts the power structure, she’s only noticed because she no longer refuses to play by the rules of color.

Meanwhile, outside Wonderland, we’re told to ‘manifest’ our way to success, ‘hustle’ until we collapse, or ’embrace the chaos’ like a soulless LinkedIn post written by an AI trying to understand why humans cry.

Carroll loves his exceptions, of course. The White Rabbit is technically “white” but scurries through the story with his peculiar agency. The Cheshire Cat appears and disappears at will, turning the concept of presence and absence into a grin hanging in the void. But these exceptions prove the rule – in Carroll’s world, you either play by the color-coded power structure or find ways to slip between its cracks, just like that coworker who somehow gets away with wearing flip-flops to meetings.

The Dream That Wakes Itself (Because Your Alarm Clock Sure Won’t)

And here’s the final twist of the knife: In Through the Looking-Glass, the Red King is asleep and dreaming of Alice. If he ever wakes up, we’re told she’ll go out “like a candle.” Just like your motivation after checking your work calendar on Monday morning.

But that’s not what happens, is it?

Alice – our hero, our white pawn promoted to queen – does something remarkable. She rejects the entire color-coded system. She wakes herself up. And yes, everything goes out like a light – but on her terms, not the Red King’s. It turns out that Wonderland’s color-coded hierarchy isn’t far off from reality—where the absurd holds power, the void is structured, and the most effective way to win is not to play the game at all.

Breaking the Color Barrier (And Maybe Your Local Reality)

Maybe that’s the real point hiding in Carroll’s color-coded worlds of game pieces and playing cards. We’re told we have to be:

But Alice shows us another way. She refuses to be a mere game piece, a card in someone else’s deck. She moves through these roles – pawn to queen, dreamer to dreamed, piece to player – and ultimately chooses to be none of them. She becomes something fuller, more colorful, more real. She tips over the board and declares herself the winner.

The void is real. The game is rigged. But Wonderland teaches us the only real move is to become ungovernable. So grab a paintbrush and a bottle of absurdity, and get to work. No one else is going to color outside the lines for you.

Welcome to the void. It comes in both black and white. But you? You can be whatever color you damn well please. Even that weird purple that HR banned explicitly in the latest dress code update.

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This post was brought to you by the Cult of Brighter Days, where we reject prescribed colors and choose to paint ourselves because that’s not the joke (but it is). Now available in colors your reality can’t even process!“