Looking for depth in all the wrong places

I've often heard people described as shallow and, to be truthful, thought of people as shallow myself. Shallow in this case means something like lacking the desire to understand the complexity in things, dig beyond the easy surface of ideas or challenge themselves. However, on reflection, I'm not totally comfortable with the idea. While people will obviously have different levels of ability, I'm not convinced that they differ significantly in their desire for depth. It's just put to better or worse use in different cases.

To put it another way, I think that people seek out a certain level of challenge and complexity. If your entire life is just walking up and down a road, you're going to start examining every rock and blade of grass, each crack in the asphalt. You might even find yourself trying to walk exactly on the painted line, counting plants as you go, or skipping instead of stepping. On the other hand, if this walk is only one of a hundred things you're doing that day, maybe the road is just a road, and you walk quickly without looking. You make things more complex to meet your ideal level of mental load.

So I believe what appears to be a general shallowness is really a kind of depth-per-topic mismatch. You may be talking to someone who "doesn't get" science and when you try to talk to them about some interesting idea they get bored and start changing the topic to work drama or something. That seems shallow because it is shallow – in the domain of things you care about. However, work drama is actually amazingly complex and difficult to navigate, especially if you want it to be. Nominally simple things like interacting with family and friends, recreational sports or buying stuff can admit an enormous amount of additional depth if needed.

If that was that, we could just use this as evidence for the absolute truth of moral relativism and move on. However, it's important not to lose sight of the reality that some things are inherently more complex and difficult, and that is a different thing from creating additional depth in simple things. The most laboriously constructed social drama-fest still requires less mental firepower than one first-year course in quantum mechanics. There's no need to seek out more complexity in inherently hard problems because they're already complex enough.

Which speaks to a certain question of efficiency. You can probably find a world of depth and challenge in lawn decorations and local council meetings if you want, but it seems like a better use of time to let easy things stay easy and instead spend time on things that are inherently challenging. Conquering a difficult problem in an easy way is more useful than conquering an easy problem in a difficult way.

It's this idea that I now identify as the problem formerly known as shallowness: not a lack of depth, but a misapplication of complexity. I look at someone who has made their life harder than it needs to be, and I can't help but think: why would you do that when there are so many naturally hard problems, problems that stay hard even if you make them as easy as you can?