Why is it that as I move through this modern system you all call life, the further I get from the depths of reality? What is depth anyway? It’s romanticism. People, myself included, easily accept and parrot the word romanticism all the while completely ignoring the concept of depth by enforcing the phrase: don’t deep it. What we all fail to recognise is that they’re one and the same — two sides of the same coin.

A quick Google search can inform you that Romanticism was a poetic movement that nurtured internalisation, turning to nature in search of feeling for the purpose of expressing creativity, often guided by emotion.[2] In parallel, psychological depth is the exploration of the unconscious, which requires an individual to look inward and organise those realisations through logic. So you see—not so far off.

For the past four hours, I’ve been trying to decipher ‘The Need of a Theory of Experience’, the second chapter of John Dewey’s booklet Experience and Education.[1] I still do not fully understand it. It got to the point where I felt so defeated by the text that I started comparing his writing style to Orwell’s—short words, cut what you can—which, if you’ve read a lick of Dewey, is violated on nearly every page. Driven by childish impatience, I found comfort in the fact that even his admirers admit the prose is a fog machine; William James, his friendly critic, is said to have called Dewey’s style damnable; you might even say god-damnable. Then it dawned on me: Dewey wrote enormously fast—forty-some books, hundreds of essays—rarely revised, and spent his life among academics who read that dialect natively. He was a man thinking out loud in the qualified, hedge-everything way philosophers talk, then printed nearly as spoken. He was not picturing a random girl in a library cubicle, reading him in the 21st century. But of course, Dewey earned his reputation not for his prose but for his ideas—which, when artfully unravelled, expose how experience and education should coincide.

Dewey says the most important attitude any experience can form is the desire to go on learning. And for that desire to stay aflame, depth must be maintained. If I cannot find meaning and purpose in my actions, it becomes that much easier to douse it.

But what of doing things for the sake of doing them? Like reading for the sake of reading. Well, that’s the first step. You can’t really dive without knowing where you are or where you plan to go. You will drown. Reading for its own sake is lovely, but for it to become a valuable experience it must demand enough of you that you leave it different—with new questions, new capacities, new places to go. Whether it felt pleasant or unpleasant along the way is almost incidental. Experiences have to be cumulative to be educative. And what makes them cumulative isn’t that they’re liked. It’s that they’re aimed. Only then can they compound into something worth living for.

Right now, we are all scattered pieces. My instinct, as someone who wants to know everything and experience as much of the world as possible, is to dabble—a bit of this, a bit of that, in hopes of learning something. But it doesn’t actually get me anywhere. Dabbling has a diet to match: I dabble in what I do and the rest of the world dabbles in what it consumes.

I find it funny that people don’t trust the information AI gives them, when the truth is they shouldn’t be seeking more information at all. Information is the cheapest it has ever been: thumbnail conversations, “fun fact, did you know?” clips, bite-sized trivia that never adds up to real understanding. It requires nothing from you. Learning, an entirely different feat from information gathering, demands the full function of your brain—the very thing that is definitive of who and what you are. Either way, dabbling is masked curiosity that quietly kills the thing it pretends to feed: nothing ever compounds enough to become genuinely rewarding. We get the spark over and over but never the fire. Depth is how curiosity pays itself back.

An experience that asks nothing of you tends to produce nothing in you—what Dewey calls non-educative, and what I internalise as lack of depth. We live in a world where everyone wants to experience something new—so much so that we skim past the very experiences that could open up a whole new world. The task is not to chase better experiences. The task is to arrange the conditions under which experiences connect. Dewey’s gift to the world, something you have to dig through the thick fog to find, is deeply romantic: learning is depth. The love we have for our passions is the fuel. Desire is the moving spring of action. But fuel without a vehicle just burns.

Love,
g.