Rethinking Conversational Depth

Every once in a while, when acquaintances converse I hear someone declare that what was said was deep. I usually find this a bit irksome. Why? Because deep is ostensibly a good thing, and most of the time I find very little that’s good in what was said.

What does a person mean when they say something is deep? In my experience people say this when they feel they don’t fully grasp what the speaker was saying; when they feel like part of what was said is still beyond the hearer’s comprehension. The obvious question then is, “What causes a speaker’s words to not be fully understood?” As I see it there are three things: the complexity of the idea being communicated, poor communication, and finally a lack of substance. When someone compliments something as deep, the idea of complexity is being assumed but it seems to me the latter two reasons are more frequently the case.

How often have you heard people call calculus, medical science, or sociology deep? I find it’s more often some platitude or mind game rather than meaningfully complex things. One I find particularly silly is the idea that each person may be seeing the same color spectrum differently; the whole “what I see as red might be what you call blue” thing. This seems deep to people who haven’t thought about it before, but when we consider that people react similarly to similar colors (This is why we use red for stop, green for go, and blue shows up well at night) we understand that we all have a similar experience of colors, so what does it mean to see them as each other? In the end it doesn’t really mean anything.

Another favorite is the question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if it is not observed. This, like many such mind games, is nothing more than a question of semantics. Do you define a “sound” as pressurized waves moving through a medium? Then yes, it does. Do you define a sound as the perception of a particular sensation in the human mind? Then no, it does not. It’s nothing more than a definitional question that’s been poorly explained… Unless you’re of the opinion that the world is not fundamental but is rather created by or for human perception, but I don’t think many people who consider this phrase go there.

There are also numerous inspirational platitudes people will call deep, many of which have not been thought through much. Often they are partial truths that could easily mislead people due to vague or open-ended wording. These tend to be the cases where I would say the substance is lacking and the implied substance make people feel there must be a deeper truth they’re missing.

So should we throw out the word? Should we just use it as a synonym for the complex in the academic sense with no additional nuance? What would be a useful way to utilize the word “deep?” If I had my say, I’d like to appropriate the word “deep” for things that go beyond self. Meeting a person’s own needs and desires is basic. That’s the surface of what it means to live and what our functional communication is for. If deep is to be something good, why not let it stand for things that go to the level bellow, and speak toward promoting the health of the society. Your life is the tree and your society is the dirt the roots are planted in. Let the deep things be the conversations about soil health, and if that conversation is a bit confusing don’t let the speaker get away with that. Communication that cannot be easily understood is usually just poor communication. Ask questions and challenge assumptions.