this post was submitted on 27 Sep 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:

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  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
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    • 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
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Take that (not) Einstein!

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago

All of your examples assume that the phrase “the same thing” is taken to be figuratively. That there is some element of “but not exactly the same” attached to the each example.

Show me a single thing, just one single thing that can be repeated absolutely identical, without the "but not exactly the same" attached to it in the real world.

Just one.

Throw a ball twice, so that it hits the same spot with sub-nanometer accuracy. Drop a ball twice in exactly the identical way.

If that's not possible, then it's not possible to do the same exact thing twice.

If that's your premise for the quote, then it becomes "Doing something impossible is the definition of insanity".

The whole quote just disappears into thin air, since it loses all it's meaning.

Hence the "but not exactly the same" is necessary for the quote to even exist.

That's why "doing the same way" never means to do something absolutely identical, because that definition is impossible to ever fulfil. And that's why that definition of "the same" isn't slang but literally in the Cambridge Dictionary

Here are the examples given there:

My twin sister and I have the same nose.

Both noses are identical, down to the atom. Right?

She was wearing exactly the same dress as I was.

Not a single thread is different on the dresses. Down to the atom identical. Cannot be distinguished. Luckily, both of the wearers seem to be of the exact same size as well, right?

Hilary's the same age as me.

Born in the same nanosecond.

She brought up her children in just (= exactly) the same way her mother did.

Not once did she say a different word than her mother said. The education was perfectly memorized and executed absolutely exactly the same way without a single difference. Every word timed to the same millisecond.

Literally exactly the same does not exist outside of mathematics.