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Vinay Menon, Toronto Star

The scariest place on Earth was revealed this week.

It’s inside the heads of Willow and Jaden Smith, the offspring of the Great Gazoo. You thought their parents were Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith? No, you were wrong. These two were hatched on an alien planet.

There was much about the cosmos I never realized until reading the first “joint interview” the celebrity munchkins granted to the New York Times this week.

Let me ask you something: what is the opposite of an apple?

Is it a banana? A skyscraper? A beanbag chair filled with metaphysical riboflavin?

I ask after struggling with the following quote from 16-year-old Jaden: “When you’re thinking about something happy, you’re thinking about something sad. When you think about an apple, you also think about the opposite of an apple.”

For example, I’m now thinking about cognitive dissonance and ontological dualism as it may apply to pomaceous fruit. But, wait, now I’m curled up under my desk and thinking about a martini or four.

Is a martini the opposite of an apple?

Next question: Why do we assume the space-time continuum is immutable?

Consider this wisdom from 14-year-old Willow: “I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist.”

So if you happen to fall off a cliff, just slow it down, Matrix-style. Oh, you may still plummet to your death. But it could take like 50 years, which would give you plenty of time to make abysmal movies and self-indulgent music while offering pseudospiritual gibberish and logical fallacies masked as divine truth.

Jaden says he doesn’t believe in driving classes because everyone he knows has been in a car accident. I suspect he may have been in the back seat, rambling on about the axiology of kiwis, but either way I’ll be sure to disconnect my fire alarms next time I hear about a house burning to the ground.

To be a teenager is to be filled with angst and confusion. Your body is changing and your mind is struggling to keep up.

So when Willow and Jaden dismiss education (“you never learn anything in school”), offer theories on existence (“a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made”) or speculate on babies and prenatal consciousness (“when they’re in the stomach, they’re so aware, putting all their bones together”), it’s tempting to give them a pass due to the folly of youth.

Then you ask another apple question: What is the opposite of a good role model?

These two see themselves as spokespeople for their generation, which is why Willow says, “I did so much for young black girls and girls around the world,” while Jaden counters with, “I’m going to imprint myself on everything in this world.”

The problem is blind luck, not talent, placed them in a position that 99.9 per cent of the teenage population will never experience.

If Jaden wants to release a 10-minute rap song called “Let It Breathe” — a meandering track that appears to be inspired by Drake and Dr. Seuss — he can do so for one reason: his father was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. If Willow wants to name-drop Osho and humble-brag about how she freestyles to a beat, all of this is made possible by her surname.

If the teen next door sent in a demo with the same music Willow and Jaden released this month, it’s doubtful he or she would get a meeting with the label’s janitor.

But the real problem with the Smith kids flows from an epistemological term neither mention: solipsism.

Against a cultural backdrop of status updates and selfies, here are two aspiring artists with no sense of art, two minds alone in a universe that doesn’t need to exist.

What music do they like? Only the stuff they make because, as Jaden notes, “we don’t think a lot of the music out there is that cool.” What novels do they read? As Willow says, “There’re no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it’s the best thing.”

If they could, you get the sense they would invent their own food and breathe something other than oxygen. It would just be better.

I would like to close by apologizing to the Kardashians, the Hiltons, the Richies and any other wealthy celebrity heirs I may have mocked over the years. I now appreciate your gum-chewing materialism, your vapid shrugs to the universe.

You never claimed to know anything. More important, you never pretended to know everything. As it turns out, you were the opposite of an apple.

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