Superficiality and burnout

First of all, some sympathy for Charlie McDonnell:

I just love the way he exposes his vulnerability and honesty in this way and i really feel huge sympathy for him.  He must be under an enormous amount of pressure and it's impossible to imagine how things are if you're afraid of disappointing more than one and a half million people.  This really makes me feel he's just a normal bloke, and it reminds me of my MA.  Poor guy.  Even so, he's got the video absolutely right:  monochrome, black background, cuts between him being on the right and the left and even L-cuts.  He's worrying about nothing.

Anyway, i now think i was right about him having a quarter-life crisis.  Not that i'm smug about that, and also, it's really annoying when people try to cram your pain and suffering into some nice, neat theory, although i suppose it might help to have some kind of explanation, or just some recognition that other people have been through the same thing and come out the other side.  It's also like writer's block, which in a way i wish i suffered from because for all i know i just spout complete garbage, but very fluent complete garbage.  I think if anything i feel fatherly towards him, which is weird because i'm such an underachiever. It must also be really annoying and creepy to have total strangers like me holding forth about him, so i'll shut up now.

Right, so no video of my own today because i accidentally made two scheduled videos public yesterday along with Liz's poetry, which is here:

Mr McDonnell may be scared of us but i'm scared of poetry, so i'll leave it there.  I have faith it's good but - well, see the other post.

Superficiality is supposed to be the topic of this entry, so i'd better get on with it.  One of the things which postmodernism sought to subvert was the notion of depth, in the sense of "deep and meaningful".  Depth, so far as i can tell, has been seen as desirable all over the world, except maybe by the Piraha tribe in the Amazon whom i think are probably a hoax of some kind, perhaps self-perpetrated.  For instance, natural phenomena are often seen as needing an explanation, often articulated through myths, way back into the prehistoric past.  The idea that this is a mistake is fairly new, at least in academic circles.  It's also quite annoying and i'm not sure where it's supposed to go.  However, it relates to the issue of hypnosis as mentioned yesterday.  My concern that something frightening might happen as a result of relieving a mere symptom through hypnosis is based on a depth-oriented view of psychology.  A shallower understanding would include the notion that the only concern is, for example, a phobia or addiction which needs to be addressed, and once it's addressed that's that.

Jimmy Savile once said, while on 'In The Psychiatrist's Chair', that what you saw of him was what you got.  In fact, that has turned out not to be so and the statement probably revealed two things:  that he probably wanted certain activities to stay hidden, possibly even from himself, and that he may even have believed that himself.  Here's a clip of that programme:

So he clearly had something to hide, hence the idea that what we saw was what we got.  Returning to post-modernism, isn't it interesting that a philosophical movement popular from the 1980s which effectively killed philosophy should prize superficiality?  Maybe we all have something we'd rather not think about.