It's Not That Deep

...I think our generation has lost ourselves a bit. In our insistence to power through the rest of life, we end up devaluing the things we shouldn't along the way. 

Like many other overused phrases and clichés, this one started off well intended. Don't drain your emotional energy focusing on little things that don't matter. If you trip on the stairs and everyone saw you, it's not that deep. If you failed a physics test, it's not that deep. To take this narrative approach on such insignificant moments in our lives is like trying to write a novel with a crayon. It's stupid. 

However, this seemingly harmless expression becomes an issue when we avoid every one of our problems with it. You could tell someone you hate your neighbor because they sucker punched your cat and landed them in the hospital and they wouldn't think it's "deep" enough to be bothered about. I see, and have used this sort of coping mechanism all the time; we convince ourselves an event isn't worthy of our heart's attention so we no longer have to deal with it. We convince ourselves that there is no story so we don't have to go through the pain of narrating it, and finding some sort of order in this unwanted chaos we refuse to acknowledge. 

Thinking it isn't so deep, we constantly test these waters and ultimately drown ourselves in it. We loose sense of how to cope with our emotions—when a tidal wave hits we don't know how to deal with it. At a certain point, we can no longer compensate by numbing ourselves so we instead become overly sensitive to everything. 

"Cancel this guy, he's a dog racist!"

"Jennifer at the salon was so mean to me today, she did my eyebrows because she didn't think they were perfect enough."

Ironically, we're becoming the exact type of people that we tried to avoid being in the first place. I can't deny that this phrase isn't in my everyday dictionary, or that it doesn't help me get through the day. But milking this expression has become exhausting, mind-numbing. The sooner we get comfortable with analzying instead of dodging meaningful aspects of our lives, the happier we'll be. As much as we avoid a narrator in our story, sometimes it doesn't make sense without one. 

Sometimes...

It is that deep.