Question which makes no sense.

After many years since first reading "Against Interpretation" by Susan Sontag, I keep coming back to the Oscar Wild quote at the beginning:

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

So here is the question: which is more complicated? The surface or the core? Is it that something looks simple, but is actually really complicated, OR does it look complicated, but is actually really simple? Can it be both?

I think this question is specifically applicable to my current body of work. I keep saying that im interested "not in how were all different, but how were all the same", but what does that really mean? How are we different and how are we the same?

Are we all individual beings, but were all fighting for the same thing at the core (love, food, sex, shelter)?

OR

Are we all fighting for the same on the outside (love, food, sex shelter) but were really actually more complicated in our core (with regards to motive, preference, perception, intuition, judgement, feeling)?

post structuralism, commodity fetishism, Derrida and the like....