the phenomenon

After all the discourse about our "post-truth" era, where facts allegedly matter less than feelings, I want to examine something equally corrosive yet less discussed. Call it the post-depth phenomenon: the transformation of depth itself into commodity, wisdom into content, and complexity into simple-ready-to-consume products.

This isn't merely shallow thinking dressed in profound language. It's the weaponization of depth's vocabulary in service of its opposite. We haven't simply lost depth; we've created such sophisticated simulations that many can no longer distinguish the performance from the real thing.

Consider how "vulnerability" has become a personal brand, "authenticity" a marketing strategy, "mindfulness" a productivity hack.^[1] The tools meant to deepen our experience have been hollowed out and repurposed as instruments of surface engagement. Words come to mean their opposites while maintaining their original costume.

the spaces of simulated profundity

I regularly inhabit spaces dedicated to conversations about the "psyche" (soul) and "human development." I confess that hearing this expression - “human development" - causes an involuntary wince and semiclosure of my eyes. Worse still if the development is "personal" rather than "human." Then the eyes roll and the wince becomes an exasperated sigh. If we replace "development" with "flourishing," syncope may be imminent.

These environments proliferate across formal and informal contexts: spontaneous and programmed, corporate and civic, national and multinational. Perhaps it happens less in academic settings, which remain boring and tedious. They haven't known how to reinvent themselves. But might there be a relationship between academic tedium and, outside those corridors, the feverish need to entertain and "impact" audiences individually and collectively, ultimately creating a community that stays connected through a hashtag?

I observe growing vacuity, superficiality, sensationalism, enthusiasm, and optimism in the messages conveyed.^[2] Applause arrives indiscriminately, most present and vehement for messages adorned precisely with these qualities. Just as the oceans are contaminated with plastics, the microscopic version achieving near-omnipresence, the universe of ideas suffers from similar intoxication. Concepts once substantial now appear plasticized: artificial and shiny, like the Barbie movie. Visually attractive but fundamentally synthetic, mass-produced, and paradoxically destined for both programmed obsolescence and eternal permanence.

the liturgy of shallow depth

So many talks and communications begin or end with petitions to close one's eyes, breathe deeply, and think of a color that may or may not tinge the whole body or a specific part. Requests seeking a fantastic and sacred inner response, because it will certainly be within each attendee, hidden beneath some trauma formed in childhood or just last week.

Sometimes the answer lies in liberation through a scream, a gesture, a jump, or a combination of all three. Or in those sublime moments when we're invited to turn to our neighbor and, gazing for a minute in silence, simply appreciate the humanity, offering our full presence and attention. Of course, it must end with hugging a stranger, because we're too much in our heads and need to embody some cheap metaphysics, to remove our shoes and touch the bare ground with our skin, connecting to the earth. All this because we're too comfortable, too blind, hypnotized by the perverse grip of consumer capitalism. All this to leave our comfort zone, because obviously, we're far too comfortable.

The narratives are invariably prescriptive, positive, and individualistically presumptuous, seeking to endow each person present with more power to assume protagonist status in their life with the goal of saving the world, preferably through a considerable increase in empathy™.^[3]

the digital distributors of diluted wisdom

In this universe of plasticized ideas, social media and influencers deserve special mention as chief distributors of pre-digested content we now call wisdom. With their carefully curated feeds, where even the "authentic" is meticulously produced, these new gurus of spiritual capitalism sell us personal development indistinguishable from consumerism.

Like old sellers of miraculous elixirs, they offer bottled solutions to humanity's existential dilemmas, only now the bottle is digital and comes with a monthly subscription. The masterclasses, transformative workshops, and weekend retreats promise to revolutionize your life for a modest investment (special promotion only until tomorrow, because there are only very few seats left!).^[4]

All this is served in short sentences, delivered emphatically, enthusiastically, and certainly, leaving little room for reflection. They aim only for agreement or its opposite, but always with an argumentative turn that, when reaching an impasse, ends with "that's my point of view" or, worse, "that's my truth."

deepities and the paradox of post-depth

The philosopher Daniel Dennett gave us the useful concept of "deepities”: statements that seem profound but are either trivially true or meaningfully false.^[5] Post-depth has industrialized the production of deepities, creating entire economies around statements like "You must lose yourself to find yourself" or "The journey is the destination."

What makes post-depth particularly insidious is how it incorporates the very language of critique into its performance. It doesn't simply reject complexity, it performs a simulacrum of complexity that inoculates itself against deeper questioning. The post-depth practitioner speaks fluently of trauma while avoiding genuine encounter with suffering. They preach presence while livestreaming their meditation. They advocate for systemic change through individual consumer choices.

The rhetorical strategies of post-depth bear an uncomfortable resemblance to populist argumentation. Both reduce complex issues to digestible slogans, both appeal to immediate emotional response over sustained analysis, and both present themselves as liberating while actually constraining thought. The populist promises simple solutions to complex problems; the post-depth practitioner promises simple transformations for complex beings. Both rely on the same certainty that everything profound can be made immediately accessible without loss of meaning.

This represents a peculiar form of certainty: the absolute conviction that all human complexity can be packaged, marketed, and consumed without loss. It's certainty masquerading as openness, rigidity performing as flexibility, superficiality convinced of its own profundity.

the technology of false transcendence

The discourse about technology oscillates frantically between utopia and dystopia, rarely stopping in the useful territory of concrete reality. One week AI will solve all our problems; the next, it will replace us all. Blockchain was the solution for human transactions until it wasn't. The metaverse was inevitable until it vanished into irrelevance.^[6]

Each technological iteration is presented not as a tool with potential, limitations, and tradeoffs, but as an inevitable revolution that will fundamentally transform what it means to be human. This technological determinism serves the post-depth economy perfectly, always promising transformation just around the corner, always deferring the hard work of actual change.

toward genuine profundity

The tragedy of post-depth isn't that we've lost access to genuine profundity. It's that we've created such convincing simulations that many can no longer tell the difference. Like tourists who prefer the sanitized cultural village to the messy authenticity of actual local life, we've grown comfortable with prepackaged insights and Instagram-ready wisdom.

But perhaps recognizing post-depth is the first step toward genuine depth. Perhaps seeing how we've commodified profundity might create space for the uncomfortable, unmarketable, genuinely transformative encounters with complexity that no workshop can deliver and no hashtag can capture.

Real depth resists commodification precisely because it's difficult, slow, and often uncomfortable. It doesn't photograph well. It doesn't fit in a tweet. It can't be achieved in a weekend workshop. It requires what I've elsewhere called "useful uselessness”: the willingness to engage with what has no immediate application, no clear ROI, no guaranteed outcome.^[7]

In a world of plasticized ideas and commodified wisdom, the better path may be to admit ignorance, to dwell in questions without rushing toward answers, to value the slow accretion of understanding over the quick fix of purchased insight.^[8] This isn't anti-intellectual or anti-spiritual. It's a call to take both intellect and spirit seriously enough to resist their reduction to consumer products.

The antidote to post-depth isn't pre-packaged profundity but patient engagement with genuine complexity. It's found not in the wellness workshop but in the difficult conversation, not in the inspirational quote but in the troubling question, not in the manufactured epiphany but in the slow recognition that some things cannot be rushed, bought, or performed.

And that recognition itself—that real depth requires time, discomfort, and the willingness to not know—might be the beginning of wisdom in an age that has forgotten what wisdom costs.