this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
750 points (94.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
35750 readers
1823 users here now
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Lol. I had these guys beat in terms of hours, and their job was nowhere near as physical as mine was.
Now I get to be a desk jockey, and it's fucking sweet. Gonna milk it, because I put my hours in.
Milking the fuck out of mine. It's not quite a usual "desk job" but i spend a lot of time sitting at a desk.
Thanks for having a sense of humour about the meme. I'm also a desk jockey. Be sure to stretch frequently and take care of your back! The tension has a way of sneaking up.
40 hr work week would be great to be honest.
So how fucked are You? 40h is actually quite a lot for Europe. In Poland I work 40, in Ireland I worked 39 and in Denmark 37.
Canada checking in with 37.5.
But let's be honest working through lunch eveyday it's actually 42.5
That's the trick. Don't work through lunch. Leave the building if it's unpaid.
I work a flat 40 with paid breaks. Canada too, but it's a union plant.
48 hrs a week contracted. That’s not counting the extra hours needed to keep on top of things. I try to limit myself to 1 hour overstaying at work …the amount of work piling up is getting uncontrollably out of hand since I started limiting myself to these hours. It used to be a routine of 2 hours of overstaying and 1 hour of logging in remotely before bed.
If you want the full answer to the question of "how fucked are you", then this work involves constant people "coming at me" (disgruntled and immature employees I'm managing and endless barrage of service user complaints) and needs to fit around 2 young children (1 has additional needs) and a wife who has a nightmare employer plus exams coming up; and a house that has an ever increasing list of maintenance tasks that have been pending. So overall, I think this describes my situation pretty accurately.
load more comments
(1 replies)
And it took a bunch of labor strikes with brutal crack downs on them to even get it down to 40 hours.
When the 40 hour workweek was invented, most workers had a wife at home to do chores. Now that women are working, we should all be working 20 hours a week.
That's absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was "invented", men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They'd sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn't as though that's all they did.
This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker's day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.
Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn't something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.
If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Nope. 40 each minimum to pay the mortgage.
Fucking kill me.
Just some important history, the 40 hour work week was developed as a labor concession in the automotive industry.
Most workers rarely work only 40 hours, especially when you include the on-call time when employees are expected to respond to call messages and emails.
Maybe we need to learn something from our grandparents and have another movement for 40-hour work weeks.
Men were able to work 40 hours back then because women were relegated to unpaid domestic labor and childcare.
When women entered the workforce, these expectations were slow to change. So now, everyone gets to work 40+ hours and a few dozen more at home. And that's the best case scenario where both partners shared the mental load. Bonus points if they have a kid which is a 24/7 job.
In a sane world, with double the people working you would expect their hours to be halved. But that will never happen so long as corporations continue to disguise the exploitation of workers as 'feminism'.
Plenty of countries where 35-40h/week, or even less, is the norm (and I mean it as no "not counted" extra hours)
Go read about the whites first contact with Polynesians, they literally stumbled on utopia and HATED it. They were FURIOUS these naked people surfed and sang and danced all day and farmed for about 15 seconds and had more food then they ever needed. They literally never heard about work, they had dance crew battles and picked their leaders by if they could do any cool tricks on the waves.
You sparked my interest, so I did go read about it. I didn't find anything like what you explained though. Do you have any sources?
Weren't polynesians a bunch of warrior tribes that pretty much hunted some pacific birds down to extinction and when they got their hands on gunpowder weapons one tribe pretty much obliterated every other tribe?
Be glad you weren't born 100 years earlier with a 100 hour work week.
Or be sad you weren't born 10.000 years earlier with a 15 hour work week.
Personally I'd prefer to not get eaten by a cave bear.
Cave bear sounds adorable. Would cuddle.
You absolutely can, right now. Once.
They were known to be especially cuddly. Unfortunately they died out 24000 years ago.
load more comments
(2 replies)
You didn't end up here, but you are a product of this environment, and "you" couldn't be born anywhere else.
anthropic principle go brrrr
Alan Watts go brrr
I hate the random black pixel in the down left corner. Go away, leave me alone!!!11!
Why is this sub committed to undoing all of the good work that was done on reddit? This should not be a screenshot.
Coulda been born on a planet of ants that just work until they die.
Could've lived in the galaxy where this meme was white text on a black background
Hey, it could be worse, we could have landed on Carboby-16, which has an 80h workweek.
Mine's 35. 40 is illegal unless you're a medical doctor. And legally I have to be paid overtime for every minute over but it's my choice.
That’s bizarro world. Here doctors work like 6 hours a week. Unless golf counts as work. Which it might now, there’s probably an executive order about that somewhere.
Make no mistake: This planet did not have a 40hr work week until we brought it here. We only have ourselves to blame.
On top of that, as another comment points out, the 40hr work week is the improvement on the system.
We really fucked it
Damn bro just solved the Fermi Paradox with a Dilbert punchline
100% actually.
I have a 40 hour work week. And two more jobs than are ten hours work per week. And I need to do these, or I don't have health insurance and can't afford my rent.
Welllll the 40 hr work week is based off our 24 hour days and some planets have much longer than 24 hours in their day. So realistically some planets could have 60 hr work weeks. Plus we have no idea the governmental structure and ideology of other worlds and if they even allow you to stop working at all/you're worked to death or if they have such an advanced society that you don't even really have to work much at all.
Basically, this is kinda dumb.
Sort of, but but really. You're right that historically the daylight hours set an upper limit on the amount of work that can be done per week for most types of work, but that limit is far higher than 8 hours per day over 5 days. The 40 hour work week is based on unions fighting for a 40 hour work week. If it wasn't for the unions you'd be working all day every day except Sunday, for religious reasons.
That might change over the next few decades too, the current fight is for a 4 day work week and studies are showing promising results there.
Unions are absolutely why we have 40 hour work weeks I wasn't saying otherwise. Just that because of how our day works 8 hours of work was what people fought for. If we had days that were 48 hours things could be different and people could have fought for 10 hours days. Of course this is all hypothetical and we have no idea what people actually would have fought for.
The point isn't about how our work week works though, it's about how dumb it is to assume that other planets wouldn't have possibly longer work weeks.
Interesting idea. Since we don’t see as well at night, we evolved to use that time to sleep. Were a day 48 hours in length we probably would have evolved to be awake twice as long, and then sleep twice as long. So proportionally we would probably be working the same amount.
Either it happens, or it doesn't. I'd say that's exactly 50/50.
view more: next ›