this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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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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My point is that those high-level macroeconomic metrics are completely divorced from the financial realities of ordinary people.
If you think the cost of living has only risen slightly relative to the buying power of the average wage-earner, then you must be sheltered and insulated by having wealth and income levels that are well-above average.
No, I'm extremely heavily laden with debt and barely getting by in one of the most expensive areas of the country, but good try. I get that the CPI isn't perfect, but there is literally no data from any source indicating that we have experienced 400% price increases, generally speaking, in the last 10 years. You're just going on vibes, selective memory, and anecdotes and you're giving ammunition to fascists who try to discredit us by pointing to people like you and saying "see? These people have no tether to reality. Look at any actual statistics and you'll see they're wrong." People like you make us look bad and made uninformed people incorrectly believe that both sides of the political divide are lying and living in their own delusional reality. Do better.
Except I never claimed that prices literally quadrupled. I merely explained how OP is utilizing a hyperbole to riff on a common experience that many people are having, which is that the buying power of the USD has been in sharp decline for long enough that people can already feel the difference.
What's true is that $20 used to feel like a decent amount of money, and now it feels like barely anything; the way $5 used to. Nowadays you'd be hard-pressed to go anywhere and spend $5 or less.
You're literally in the showerthoughts community, it's not meant to present literal, accurate statistics. Its MO is basically to have at least some inaccuracy or logical inconsistency, because when you're in the shower you don't have a computer in front of you to immediately verify every heuristical thought process that "seems about right." The "sounds close to truth, but technically isn't" is what makes it a "shower thought."