this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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I feel like the people I interact with irl don't even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.

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[–] Rawrosaurus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm not entirely sure that is "normal" though. We don't have to go back very far to reach a point where people would be making their own tools for their craft. I think this modern day is pretty abnormal in the grand scheme about not knowing how the things used actually work or is put together.

do you know the proportion of people making those tools? Like how many people could make tools, and work a technically skilled trade, compared to those who didn't. Also, if you have a very narrow set of things you need to make, it doesn't really do a whole lot more inherently. To see this before computers computers, just look at cars. Once they became mainstream you started to see that most people had no clue how they worked, and no interest in knowing.

My grandmother's generation of my family were largely farmers. Like mostly born between 1910 and 1923. They knew how to make, and fix, tools, fences, etc. However, once they got away from this specific knowledge, that they grew up with, they were completely disinterested, and were suspicious of people who had broader knowledge sets. They also thought learning from reading was pointless, as they never were interested in reading, so they developed their reading skills to be just enough to get by, and became intensely frustrated when they ran into an issue, on the farm, they hadn't before, and needed to read the manual for whatever piece of equipment it was. They also did this thing, where they would be doing something, like repairing/installing/expanding their irrigation system, but they didn't have a fundamental understanding of why it worked. Just that you did these things, in this way, and it would work. They also didn't care why it worked, just that it did.