[es7]

> Most people are not deep or interesting, and are easy to plot on a database

This strikes me as only very superficially true. In my own experience as a human, I've found that every person I meet is unique and interesting in meaningful ways. I didn't use the term "deep" because it seems ill-defined in this context. If one of the main ways you think about "most people" is "not deep", then it seems to me that you're letting arrogance blind you to reality.

What I mean by that is that there's an infinite number of ways for depth to emerge in our complex reality. Thinking deeply with the most linear and rational parts of our brains on a specific category of topics is just one of those many ways. Many times, the illusion of shallowness emerges when the "others" understand something intuitively that the judgmental person only knows how to think about logically.

Fancy clothes and toys are a status symbol. Within interpersonal hierarchies, status is incredibly important and many parents believe that it is important for their child to grow up with a sufficiently high feeling of status within their peer groups. That helps the child learn interpersonal interactions in a certain way, and it helps them develop their self-esteem and self-image in certain ways and it also reflects back on the parents. You might choose to dismiss status and social hierarchy and social development as irrelevant to the life you want to live, but it doesn't make the topic any less complex or interesting for the people who do value those things.

Reading to the end of your comment again, I'm hoping you're just a troll, because a worldview that groups people into categories like "better than you" and "worse than you" without context is a dangerous worldview. I hope for your own sake that you take the time to revisit that opinion.

[Bancakes]

Status used to be defined by achievements - it had weight back then. Consumerism is a modern phenomenon and to me seems to enable people to compensate for a lack of character and skill with abundance of inanimate objects. Suzy wears an artsy dress - can she draw one? Billy sports an expensive calculator - can he plot with it well?

I say people are not deep because often they cease growing, and instead develop sentimentality and culture around something which is mass-produced and soulless. Then human connections shift from direct and interpersonal to being routed over a net of purchased goods.

I don't like it either but humans are normally distributed over different metrics, and it makes sense to look above and climb up, instead of accepting yourself. People change, don't be yourself.