this post was submitted on 06 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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This is actually fairly normal through human history. Oasies dry up, mines run out, rivers change, easily fortified locations prove later impractical, trade routes move due to conflict or geography. When it happens within your lifetime, it triggers the cognitive bias of loss aversion. You feel it personally. When it happens a century or two before, it's a curiosity.
I've spent a lot of time in dying or ghost towns, and no one owes any human settlement the right to exist in perpetuity. If humans vanished tomorrow, who would mourn your or my hometown?
Years ago, I went with a girlfriend to visit her relatives who lived in several rural Minnesota towns. As we drove down the highway, we saw lots of little towns with 3 and even 2 digit populations. Some towns were one intersection, sometimes without even a traffic light, but they'd always seem to have a post office, and a couple of bars.
In one low 2 digit small town, her relatives made up nearly half the population, and she took me through several empty houses and buildings that used to belong to relatives, all unlocked. One was an old abandoned forge where some great-great relative had been a blacksmith long ago. We stayed in a family-owned house that was fully furnished, but nobody lived there since an uncle passed away several years before.
That trip was about 50 years ago (!), and many of those towns were already on a long decline back then. Surely many of them have collapsed since then, and emptied out.
They hated him because he told the truth
my dog :(
Actually, he'd just wait outside a pizza parlor on a sidewalk....
Still somehow too soon.