this post was submitted on 20 Nov 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
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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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[–] stringere@sh.itjust.works 22 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

how expensive it is to be poor

For anyone that needs the read, Terry Pratchett said it so well it is an economic theory now, the Boots theory.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.[4]

From Men at Arms by Sir Terry Pratchett

Also, a history of "people don't want to work" bullshit going back to 1894: https://thunderdungeon.com/2024/07/14/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/

[–] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

People don't want to work and are lazy is a bullshit talking point even older than 1894.

The first ever modern self-help book ever published (literally called self-help) was made a man with a lifelong history of business and financial failure and yet also still believed that it was no legislation or social assistance, but personal 'morals' and ethics are what gets people out of poverty and into comfort.

It was bullshit then and bullshit now. It is such a dark realization that what causes so much quality of life increases is not productivity or technology but legislation and policy.

[–] stringere@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It is such a dark realization that what causes so much quality of life increases is not productivity or technology but legislation and policy.

And that's how we got Prosperity Gospel: rich folk trying to justify their lazy asses hoarding wealth and complaining about the people who actually do the work wanting fair compensation for their time and effort.

[–] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 2 points 4 hours ago

Prosperity Gospel is a bit older than that. There was a time when people thought that being rich or becoming rich was a direct blessing from god... ironically the people who really first disputed that in Europe were the Dutch, whose trade and double-entry accounting laid the foundation of modern capitalism.

I should mention that in 1001 Arabian Nights, at least in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, Sinbad (as an old man telling his story to a young man coincidentally named Sinbad as well) that his fortune was more luck than anything. At least he acknowledged that.