‘Shallow Is Hollow’ (Living Your Life With Dr Abdulfattah Adeyemi )
Shallowness is to say that a person doesn’t think much beyond superficialities and gives surface meaning to things and events. It usually means that the person lacks intellectual depth and curiosity.
That is, in the events of life, he is busy talking when he should be listening, teaching when he should be learning. In terms of relationships, a shallow person is one who would primarily focus on a woman’s looks instead of exploring her mental capabilities, or concentrate on the size of a man’s pocket, rather than his good characters. In religious context, he is a dogmatic doctrinaire, who holds on to texts, ignoring the spirit.
A shallow person is very quick at passing judgments of condemnation on others, without understanding their stories and circumstances.
He judges a book by its cover: he is prejudiced, intolerant, and can neither appreciate efforts nor decipher potentials. Shallow minded people don’t catch a joke or grasp a humor easily. They don’t understand the drift of any gist that requires some form of intellectual depth.
Hence, they get angry at little things of ineffectual significance, argue over non-issues, and they are not very good at appreciating the use of common sense. They are often grouped together with people who are gullible or naïve, fake or hollow.
On the social media, he may be a person who never questions any received information. They believe everything they read, and forward every message they receive, however obviously ridiculous such views are. Similarly, a shallow person stays stuck for hours on the internet as if literally entangled in a virtual spider web, only for him to wind up knowing so many wrong things.
He could also spend so much on cable television that gives him over three hundred channels, out of which he hardly watches ten, then squander hours switching from one channel to the other, without necessarily adding any value to his life.
A shallow life can be a life with no productive ambition, no meaning, no adventure, no memories and no stories. It is an utterly boring existence that is almost pointlessly pre-programmed and aimlessly regimented: get up in the morning, go to work, return home, sleep, and wake up again to repeat the routine.
There is no improvement in the life, no increase in knowledge, no deeper understanding of situations, no dexterity on job, and no thinking beyond monetary value that is vainly attached to the daily toils. We should see more than what we look at, hear beyond what we are told, and think outside our boxes.
A shallow person doesn’t dig beneath the surface of inspiration; talk less of bringing up a treasure of wisdom to pass on to the next generation.
