The Loss of Depth
Five writers on expression, precision, wisdom, and self-awareness.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 113 | James Gibb
It’s never been easier to express ourselves. And never harder to say something real.
I’m in San Sebastián in northern Spain. Basque Country. A long-planned trip with friends I’ve known since I was eleven. Most of us are turning fifty this year. Whether we’re celebrating or commiserating depends on the hour and the cerveza.
This is a place that takes craft seriously. Food, architecture, time itself. Tomorrow we’re visiting Arzak, a three-Michelin-starred family restaurant that’s been serving and satisfying locals and visitors since 1897. Today, it’s the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
It’s a useful setting to think about what still carries depth. And what doesn’t.
The five pieces of writing below come from very different domains—space travel, literature, the internet, psychology, and philosophy—but each captures the same tension between expression and depth.
1. Marina Hyde on the death of shared meaning
Reflecting on the recent all-female Blue Origin flight into space, led by Jeff Bezos’ fiancée and framed as a heavily marketed feminist milestone:
“Ultimately, it felt like a sign of the times that everything was about personal growth rather than affording any new understanding of wider humanity. As [Gayle] King put it: “I’m so proud of me right now.” Everyone, bar none, talked in whatever trite solipsism language has been reduced to by a permanent diet of social media self-care.”
Read the full piece in The Guardian.
A clean hit on the narcissism economy from one of the sharpest columnists in the U.K. A galaxy away from the pioneering spirit of the Apollo missions.
2. Gustave Flaubert and the precision of prose
From Madame Bovary (1857)
“The moon, perfectly round and deep red, was rising straight from the earth, at the far end of the meadow. It climbed quickly among the branches of the poplars, which hid it in places like a ragged black curtain. Then it appeared in the empty sky, dazzling white, filling it with light and, slowing, it spread over the river a wide stain that formed an infinity of stars; and the gleam of silver seemed to twist all the way down to the bottom, like a headless snake covered with luminous scales.”
Nobody wrote quite like Flaubert. This single passage from his 19th-century masterpiece conjures both beauty and menace, intricately layered together like satin. Psychological as well as visual.
3. Charlie Warzel on our digital burden
From The Atlantic:
“Public figures belong in the history books, but do the rest of us? I’ve long loved the web because, like space, its boundlessness evokes both excitement and possibility. But as the internet gets bigger and more unknowable, and as my own presence across it continues to grow, I feel that the opposite is happening to me—that I am becoming hyper-knowable, paying multibillion-dollar companies so that I may curate my own self-indulgent presidential library whose final purpose is unclear. An internet that once felt limitless and freeing now feels like a restraint.”
A potent piece of self-awareness, and a reminder that we’re all now curating archives of ourselves, not always consciously, and rarely with any sense of what it’s for.
4. Paul Bloom on the limits of self-help books
From his Substack page:
“The problem with stories [in self-help books] is that you can’t take them as evidence for general principles. They suggest that at least one person’s life was improved by, say, waking up at 5 AM and walking barefoot on the grass, engaging in mindfulness meditation, sleeping in a separate room from their partner, studying Stoic wisdom, never splitting the difference, getting to Inbox Zero, and living life each day as if it was their last. But we don’t know whether most people would find this advice useless or worse than useless. And, really, we don’t even know if this one person’s life was improved. Maybe they would have been better off if they slept in, split the difference, and lived each day as if they had years and years of life ahead of them.”
A reminder that anecdote is not evidence, and that living well resists prescription. Bloom, a psychologist, asks us to be wary of anyone who insists they’ve cracked the code. He’s also aware of the irony of offering advice about advice.
5. David Brooks on the spiritual trait of wisdom
“Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is. But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self centered person wise. It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.”
Wisdom is about both seeing and being. Where one has restraint, perspective, and grace, especially when it’s hardest.
We might surmise that depth comes from seeing and being more. And saying less.
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