Sometimes Interesting is as Important as Important

I dreamed that I was having lunch with Barack Obama yesterday. Michelle was there too. I'm not sure where I was. It was clearly a gathering of lefties, but my mother was the only one I knew.

It was maybe a potluck, or maybe just a few people provided lunch. We were sitting around a folding table like the kind at my church. Barack was at the head of the table, and I was sitting to his right, but nobody else was paying much attention to him. In fact, when they started serving lunch, they brought plates to the people at the other end of the table first. (This clearly disturbed the woman sitting to my right, who brought her plate to Barack, who hadn't been served yet.)

We chatted a little, but not much. At one point, I turned to tell my mother about something we had eaten a few days earlier. All in all, it was not that exciting. The only specific interchange I remember having with Barack was when Michelle, who was seated to his left, had gotten up, and for some reason, he'd taken her seat. I said something like "I guess you get tired of always being at the head of the table, huh?" And he agreed. And then I think I said something about the head of the table being wherever he was sitting. Now that I think about it, that kind of folding table has legs in the way if you're sitting on the end. Why would they put him there?

Anyway, this is all preface to my real point. The other day, Judith Warner had a column in the New York Times about how the president has "seeped into our collective consciousness." She wrote about people having dreams about him and Michelle. (The NYT is clearly controlling my dreams now. Should I be worried?)

It was interesting, as are most of Warner's columns. What gets me are the people who add comments about how she should write about something more important.

Who are these people? You see them a lot if you read comments on pretty much any quasi-public/political blog, NYT and Huffington Post especially. They make the decision to read what is clearly fluff journalism, and then they scold the writer for writing it. If you aren't interested, don't read!

There is clearly a multiplicity of uses for the internet. Sometimes, we read for information and for interchange about important ideas like healthcare reform or poverty or how to get Congress in line. But a lot of the time, people are on the internet for fun. We want to read things that are interesting, but trivial. We aren't in the mood to think deeply or be disturbed.

I have noticed this in my own internet reading habits. I may read a couple articles or columns about "important" things, but then I move onto things like the article about how color affects how well our brains do certain kinds of tasks. Interesting? Sure. Important? Probably not.

I've noticed this with you too, my dear readers. The posts here that get comments are not the political posts, but the trivial but interesting ones. And that's okay.

The truth is that our brains can only handle so much depth at a time. But they crave more stimulation despite having reached their quota for deep thought. I think shallow thinking is a basic brain need, like sleep. Sometimes that unimportant information may end up becoming important, sometimes it may provide interesting small talk for relating to others, but most often, it's just a way of keeping our brains in shape. And that's important too.

So why don't we all just admit that we don't need to or want to be deep and important all the time? There shouldn't be any shame in that.