by marmalade

Created on: March 05, 2007   Last Updated: September 29, 2008

Unfortunately those of us who pride themselves on cultivating and displaying substance and intelligence, are liable to suffer extreme bouts of nausea when confronted with the levels of shallowness that some embrace. What makes me feel particularly neauseaus are people who I know are intelligent and capable of an interesting conversation who for reasons of their own go to great lengths to convince their audience they apitomise egocentricity, stupidity, and vanity.

I am convinced that the reason most shallow people behave the way they do is that at some point in their lives their behavior has been reinforced as cute, amusing or entertaining. The typeof people who do this reinforcing are generally people who do not value others for their intelligence, insight or empathy and instead prefer to surround themselves with superficial, small-minded and egocentric air-heads in an attempt to inflate their own feelings of self-worth. Or else they(for whatever reason) desperately want to keep the bigger, deeper issues of reality at a safe distance.

Being a bit of a geek in high school I was not perceived as a threat. There was a girl in my science and maths class who did really well academically and that you could have an interesting conversation with. She had an intelligent and inquiring mind. However you would never guess it to see her out in the playground at lunch. To impress the cool guys, she would act like the biggest bimbo under the sun. She would always make them look good (even though I knew they were struggling with most of their classes and she was flying through). I later bumped into her again at university. So presumably she wasn't stupid: she was just (at the time) acting shallow.

I believe that another reason people behave in a shallow manner is that those who do not have much to offer in the way of personality or intellect learn only too quickly that in certain social contexts behaving in a shallow manner can prove an effective social crutch. It can help avoid embarrassing lulls in conversation and ensure that no one takes them too seriously. People with agendas or substance are not challenged by them and so therefore do not feel threatened.

So in my mind there are two types of shallow people: those who are intelligent but have not been valued for their intelligence (and instead have had more shallow behaviours reinforced) and so present themselves to the world as having no substance; and those who use shallowness as a social crutch (whether or not they need to).

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