I had a very revealing conversation recently. In the midst of it one of the two people I was talking with apologized for being shallow. I rushed in to assure her that she was not shallow. Turned out her apology was ironic. This was clear to her and the the other woman in the conversation but not to me. The conversation, I should add, took place on line and there were no emojis attached to her statement. She just said what she said and felt that it should have been obvious that she was being ironic and the fact that her friend also grasped this is proof that she's not crazy. She said something that she and another person took as a sane, rational thing to say.
What she said was that she had watched a particular video at the surface level. She acknowledged that the surface meaning was incoherent but she liked that surface meaning and wanted to stay at that level. This followed by "I guess I'm a shallow person." I was supposed to understand that this was not an actual apology.
I know what your thinking: isn't staying on the surface another way of saying "shallow"?
That doesn't make her shallow. Well, not immediately anyway.
It's a funny way of thinking though. I don't think it's her fault. It's just the way two generations have been brought up now. I remember noticing it first in the 1980s when I was working with teenagers. There was a funny transition where kids stopped being able to take criticism because they personalized. To admit they had done a bad thing was the same thing as being a bad person. As a consequence, you couldn't criticize their actions without wounding them deeply. I think you see the same dynamic at work here—it is impossible to recognize shallow behaviour for what it is because that reasonable judgment is taken as condemnation of the entire person which would not be reasonable.
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