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:
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.
You've obviously put a lot more thought into this than I ever will, but I've never reached a point of claustrophobia, more the opposite, like agoraphobia. Every time I learn a little more there's references to things I don't know yet so need to learn those to understand that. But surprise! That topic also has references and underlying details I don't understand and haven't heard of before.
I get very intimidated by the awareness of the sheer scope of my ignorance.
I can certainy understand your viewpoint, there are layers upon layers of unknowns. I can see how that Vastity can be overwhelming.
Gives new meaning to ignorance is bliss…
But seriously, take solace in the fact that you can never know everything about something. Physics, math, random subjects, you name it. The world and knowledge forever increase. So there is no way in your lifetime you’ll ever fill a chamber. Thinking you can is limiting hubris on your end. The more you learn, the more you’ll realize there’s so much you don’t know.
That is the flipside and my main motivation for constantly seeking new information. At worst, this entire thing leaves me with a sort of melancholy centered around the idea that one of my desires is slowly chipping away at one of my pleasures, even though the first will always trump the latter in this case (I'd rather suffer with the truth in my lap).
I'm no psychologist, but I do have racing thoughts as an engineer type shell over an artistic skeleton with a consistent stream of visual ideas. If you're anything like me, then I ask, what other intellectual and creative outlets do you have besides reading up on subjects? Could the fear of completing a topic stem from realization you have no way to apply it?
I've had some of those, yes, but it usually comes after learning enough about the 'affected' subject to be able to do a cost-benefit analysis of what it would mean to risk seeking mastery of it. It doesn't come as a fear of completion, it comes as a fear of it taking up too much space and leaving me with too little for everything else in which I'm interested. I genuinely don't think completion in itself is ever possible, either from a practical or philosophical perspective.
To answer your question, I also like to write (journaling - which has slowly shifted toward writting essays for my own understanding, poetry), to paint, to draw, to mess around with Legos (which is, so far, the only medium which does an awesome job at accommodating both my artistic/intuitive and my rational components), to ponder (i.e. sitting in silence for a while and just chewing through the info I have, trying to establish new and useful connections between all elements), and reading a lot of fiction (primarily hard sci-fi). Oh, and I like to people-watch - which is somewhat improperly said, because I'm not there solely for the people, I like to observe the system of interactions unfolding
In different words, I think we have a similar idea. I said completion, you said mastery. I said no way to apply the new knowledge, you said not enough room to house other topics of interest. So if you want to continuously expand your knowledge to a sufficient degree but don't want to reach the end, what is the goal?
Lego is great. It gives you literal building blocks to skip the creation of building blocks and go straight to synthesis and assembly. It's like if you made a painting with a book of stickers of common brush strokes. They're limited in certain ways like being a square grid for the most part, but build until there's a physical limitation. Either use some hinges, or start getting involved with other build materials.
General art is something I've enjoyed creating but my skill isn't great. I've currently focused on building utilitarian things with a new home. Wish there was a shelf unit of these exact dimensions? Sounds like a trip to buy lumber then. Could be the perfect little monitor riser deck. You could say I'm bad at building things but I prefer to say I'm good at building bad things. They work, they're just a little ugly.
But back to the main topic. While I certainly promote educational pursuits and productive use of time, if it causes this much stress every time, I think you should consider it might be some type of anxiety. I know the immediate goal is learn more, but where does it go from there? What's the real underlying goal? It may not be obvious to you. Is it to create success in your career? To establish superiority over your peers? If it was purely a joyous pursuit, I don't think you'd be posting about it like this. Don't stop learning, but beware of burnout as well as be considerate towards yourself when you reach some end point in a topic.
What about thing we as a species don't yet know yet? The more we know the more we know we don't know.