We’ve all said it: “You’re overthinking it.” Or maybe, “It’s not that deep.” It slips out in group chats, in class discussions, and under posts that make us uneasy. But what if that phrase, meant to keep things light, is actually proof of how shallow we’ve become?
We live in an age where information never stops moving. Every scroll floods us with headlines, memes, arguments, half-truths, and moral verdicts delivered in under thirty seconds. We’re fluent in reaction but illiterate in reflection. The problem isn’t that everything we see is meaningless. It’s just that we’ve lost the patience, and the courage, to find out what anything really means.
When someone asks a real question in English, “What if the author’s using this curtain shows grief?” Someone always jokes, “Maybe the curtain’s just blue.” Everyone laughs. The tension disappears. That joke is small, but it says everything about us. It tells us that curiosity is embarrassing, depth is pretentious, and noticing too much makes you the problem. So we learn to stop noticing.
In school and beyond, curiosity often earns you eye-rolls. You’re “extra.” You “try too hard.” We internalize a message: don’t risk being wrong. It’s safer not to ask. So we stop. We resist noticing tension, irony, contradiction, hidden motives. The impulse to chase subtlety recedes altogether. That’s how “maybe the curtain is just blue” shifts from a possible interpretive choice to a rhetorical shutdown. Someone suggests a deeper reading. Reflexively: “Nah, you’re overthinking, it’s just…” That shutdown becomes automatic, cutting off curiosity and retreating to safe territory.
You can trace this mindset everywhere now. On forums, a common gripe is that literary overanalysis feels “pretend” or academic-only, something divorced from real life. Teachers who invite students to question structure, ideology, or power often meet resistance (The Franklin Post). Researchers call it student resistance: when learners are asked to examine how texts mediate power, many resist not necessarily out of laziness, but because it feels alien, risky, or unwanted (McFarland).
That reflex doesn’t stay in the classroom. It follows up onto our screens. The same skill we use to analyze a poem—asking who speaks, what is omitted, how framing works—is the one that helps us navigate misinformation. Yet we’ve been trained to dismiss it. The National Association for Media Literacy Education defines media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. It’s the difference between being informed and being manipulated. But when “it’s not deep” becomes our default, we stop analyzing altogether.
That’s not accidental, it’s by design. Algorithms thrive on clarity and conflict. They don’t want you thinking slowly. They want you choosing sides quickly. Outrage, certainty, and simplicity are the currencies of engagement. Complexity kills clicks. So posts that are messy, ambiguous, or unresolved disappear under louder ones. The result is a generation that can decode irony but not propaganda. We skim everything: news, art, people. We don’t read. We react.
It wasn’t always like this. A few years ago, when “fake news” became a buzzword, it seemed like the world was finally waking up. We talked about misinformation and fact-checking, about how easily lies spread. But the conversation stopped at awareness. We never built the muscles to think critically about what we see. We never learned how to pause. And that pause—the gap between stimulus and judgement—is where depth lives. Media literacy isn’t just a checklist of skepticism. It’s an ethic. It means asking who made this message, what it wants from you, and what it hides. It means knowing the difference between discomfort and danger. It’s what lets us feel something confusing without mistaking that feeling for harm.
Critical thinking isn’t about doubting everything. It’s about understanding why something feels convincing. It’s recognizing the emotional hooks in a post, the structure of a headline, the way outrage disguises itself as urgency, It’s knowing when you’re being played. But in a world moving this fast, that kind of patience feels impossible. We don’t stop to ask who created this? What’s missing? What does it want from me? We just feel, click, share.
Maybe that’s why everything feels so hollow lately. We’re overwhelmed, not uninformed. We’ve traded attention for access. Every day we absorb a thousand stores, but process none. And yet we call that staying “updated.” We skim our way through meaning, hoping the truth will float to the surface on its own.
If there’s a way out, it starts small. Not with new rules, but new habits. Next time you see something interesting, don’t just like, investigate. Ask what emotion it’s using to keep you there. When something confuses you, resist scrolling. Let the discomfort breathe. That’s where thought begins. In class or even on your own, try rewriting what you read: flip the framing, switch the speaker, trace how the meaning shifts. And if you’re a teacher, try to slow things down: Why this headline? Whose voices are missing? What creative choices shape your reaction? Let students rewrite stories from different angles. Compare a tweet with its original source. Talk about why something is viral. Give them tools to see how narratives are built. Because if we can’t decode how stories work, we’ll always be at their mercy.
“Maybe the curtain is just blue” can sometimes be true. But when it becomes the default, it’s no longer skepticism—it’s surrender. The world is full of meaning, hidden motives, contradictions, and quiet manipulations. To dismiss depth is to hand over your attention to whoever shouts the loudest. Everything really is that deep. The question isn’t whether meaning exists. It’s whether you’re brave enough to look for it.
