We Need Depth to Die Well

There’s a reason people avoid emotional depth in public—it asks something of them. And we live in a culture that rewards avoiding that ask.

In the algorithmic agora where spectacle reigns, what gains traction is what’s fast, shiny, and easily metabolized. We scroll not to feel, but to forget that we haven’t felt in a long time. The drive isn’t toward meaning—it’s toward dopamine. A momentary surge. A flicker of aliveness mistaken for connection.

Depth, by contrast, is a slow animal.

It doesn’t shout.

It waits.

It arrives with silence, asks for your breath, your body, your attention.

It mirrors you back to yourself.

But most people were never taught how to sit with their own reflection. Most were conditioned to curate, to manage perception, to sanitize grief and flatten longing. Emotional depth threatens that scaffolding. It cracks the veneer of self-control.

To engage deeply in public—to pause before a raw post, an honest piece of art, a trembling truth—is a risk. It means letting others see you feel. And in a culture rooted in individualism, shame, and performance, that’s close to sacrilege.

So we don’t metabolize depth. We scroll past it.

We double-tap the photo of the latte.

We save the vulnerable post for later (that never comes).

We say “beautiful” but don’t let it land.

The cost is immense.

A public that avoids depth becomes a public that cannot mourn.

Cannot witness.

Cannot change.

We become a culture of amnesia, addicted to novelty and starving for the real.

We become afraid of the very medicine we need.

But what if we reimagined what public space could be?

What if we made room for truth that didn’t require a takeaway?

What if depth wasn’t relegated to therapy rooms and private journals, but belonged in the square—in our speech, our art, our gatherings?

A culture that reclaims depth is one that learns to hold paradox.

One that re-members itself.

One that can kneel beside another’s grief without fixing it.

One that can tell a new story—not the story of control, but of contact.

We need new rituals of presence.

New architectures of attention.

New myths that make space for the sacred to be public again.

Because the truth is,

depth isn’t too much.

It’s what we’ll need to die well.

To grieve what’s gone.

To meet what comes next with presence instead of panic.

A culture that turns away from depth turns away from its own becoming.

But one that remembers how to feel—together, in public—

is a culture that can midwife the unknown,

and make something sacred of the dark.