this post was submitted on 10 Dec 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:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- 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
- Posts must be original/unique
- 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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People making things worse isn't a natural state.
To give an example off the top of my head, the US House of Representatives used to be even worse. An interpretation of the Constitution's quorum clause became traditional in that if a rep would not answer "present" when called to a vote they were counted as not in attendance. Essentially, a minority faction gave themselves a veto on the whole body. This persisted for decades until one speaker just said "I can see you there", and the body got slightly better.
(That it was latter became bad all over again in new and clever ways is a slightly different issue.)
The house of representatives is arguably a technology (or something like that. A shared machine?). Technologies are a special case. We've got big groups of people actively striving to improve them.
The casual, half-neglected "everything else" is the norm. Tragedy of the commons and progressively intensified exploitation of that commons is the norm.
Unless it is specifically protected and fostered it gets chewed to bits. The only thing that really protects it is keeping it out of reach (through lack of communication, transportation or whatever)
I don't think it's often useful to react to contrary evidence as special case exceptions.
The "tragedy of the commons" is a real thing, but it's also literally what "the cathedral and the bazar" is about. I would argue that the awareness and intentional action made based on either side of this mode is why technology seems to behave differently from other areas of human society.
Generalizing from the specific, I think it's more helpful to say "things tend to change randomly over time, and people can be resistant to sudden change which is not obviously better."
Since random change is more likely to be a change for the worse than a change for the better, societies will have a tendency to slowly become worse as time goes on. But the worse something gets the easier it is for people to discard it, and since intentional changes for the better are so often deliberate they also are often improvements to the best of what came before.
Enshittification occurs more as a deliberate act to increase revenue or decrease cost, which is a whole different ball game.
But we're always trying to increase revenue and decrease cost. That's biological. It's a constant.
So enshittification and change for the worse look alike. So maybe conflate them
So the only thing free from this constant worsening is that which we give special attention to improving. (Ex : technology)
(It's a strong argument for personal discipline. Chaos is the norm. Insanity is the norm. Rot is the norm. Etc)
You may have this habit, but it's hardly universal to our species. My biology tells me to value the stability of home life and the predictability of patterns; any increase in revenue or reduction in costs is from learned habits or intentional action.
I completely agree about personal discipline being a good bulwark against accidental change for the worse, though.