this post was submitted on 20 Feb 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:

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Ad companies are the ones destroying civilization (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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The internet runs on ads.

Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.

So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.

Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.

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[–] rhymeswithduck@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think you're giving Campbell way more credit than he is generally given by the writing community at large. Yes, that is one way to write a story, but it's certainly not the only method taught. For example, slice-of-life stories are completely acceptable, however it is harder to get some of the nuance across to new writers. The hero's journey is an easy starting point, that's all. And I really don't think Campbell was trying to say that's how everything should be. He was making observations about what he already saw in popular western media.

I don't understand your seeming conflation of advertising and art, which seems like a separate point from your criticism of Campbell. Advertising does not control art, nor vice versa. It makes more sense to look at things through the lens of money: art can be basically free to create (writing, drawing, street art are all pretty cheap). Anyone can do it. Now, something like making a film is not cheap. It can cost millions of dollars, and not many people have enough lying around to do so without getting a return on that investment. In other words, film has to make money. They know the hero's journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero's journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn't worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

Advertising is a different beast altogether, and I'm not sure why you would criticize it for not being art. It was never supposed to be that.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

I think you see this conversation as discussing a serious of fairly innocuous individual elements whereas I see it as part of a broader, irrevocably intersectional problem that must be addressed in a wholistic fashion by integrating all pieces of it. I see advertisement as not separate from art and only harmful in its unintended collisions with it but rather an intentional as well as subconscious colonization and co-opting of the societal values around human artists that has culminated inevitably in AI wrecking havoc on what remains of our curiosity about human creativity.

Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.

...

Thinking about the culturally specific influences behind familiar stories is important because it reveals that many of the assumptions that exist within our own culture that we take for granted are not universal at all, but rather rooted in very culturally specific prejudices. For instance, in the Star Wars movies, darkness and the color black are both closely associated with evil. The evil side of the Force is referred to as the “dark side” and the title darth, which is used by the evil Sith Lords, literally sounds like the word dark. On top of this, Darth Vader wears a black suit and the Emperor wears a black cloak.

This association of darkness and the color black with evil is rooted in Christianity, which has been the dominant religion in the United States for most of modern history. Throughout the writings of the New Testament, darkness is repeatedly equated with evil and Satan, while light is repeatedly associated with goodness and God. For instance, in the Gospel of John 8:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

"It's always night, or we wouldn't need light"