Link clicking is easy mode surfing. Level up by using search engines. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraph_(literature) is the next harder mode link to follow, but every noun phrase, and sometimes also other textual constituents, or even images, provides a potential link to traverse.
Those are direct associations. We can also generate new search terms from old. After we know at least two distinct topics, we can search for instances of what they have in common. After determining how they differ, we can see what we get if we apply that difference to yet other ideas, etc.
Thanks for recommendations!
thanks
Context: when you asked about "what's cool" it reminded me of the old "what's cool" link from the netscape homepage that used to load on many peoples' start page. That site is a copy of it from 1994 but all of the links I tried didn't work since it is quite old. Also, some (all?) of those things would no longer be considered 'cool'.
A more serious answer - think of something you do or are interested in that you don't regularly read up on the web. There could be an interesting subreddit with a wiki or FAQ.
But to unask your question, maybe we don't need to be spending more time online, but less. Maybe let the internet be boring.