Daniel Dennett called them deepities, those quips and clichés and truisms that seem to be capturing some profound truth, but, on closer inspection, turn out to be meaningless gibberish. If not simply tautological, they are either logically incoherent, so general as to be informationally vacuous, or, quite frequently, demonstrably false.
“Love is eternal.” “Happiness is where you least expect it.” “Beauty is only skin deep.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “Time heals all wounds.” “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” “Age is just a number,” and “You are only as old as you feel.” Several of these are clearly false. Others are entirely empty of content. Love is either a meaningless abstraction, or, at best, a transient emotional posture. Either way, there is nothing eternal about it. Happiness is a result, an outcome, not an object occupying space. The surface appearance of beauty is critically dependent on the bone and tissue structures beneath the skin. Much of what happens is simply random, with no reason behind it whatsoever. Wounds can fester and become gangrenous with time, and that which doesn’t kill you can leave you quadriplegic. Yes, age is a number—we use the enumeration of years as a way of designating the passage of time—but just a number? Really? Even if it was possible to feel a specific age, a feeling can’t change how long you have been in existence.
These seem harmless on the surface. But in a society of distraction, where there is little opportunity to consider the truth-value of the many bits and chunks of information spattered at us, the unexamined is taken at face value, and our understanding of the world becomes a piece of cheap box-store furniture: preformed and predrilled for quick assembly, but likely to collapse if actually used.
