this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
44 points (94.0% liked)

Showerthoughts

40677 readers
981 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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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
vatlark@lemmy.world
forkball@lemmy.world
SuperEars@lemmy.world
44
Suspension Of Disbelief should be studied more (piefed.zip)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Usually refering to works of fiction, movies, TV etc.

But I think it's a much larger phenomenon. It has esaped fiction, entered real life and politics. It drives a lot of people these days to stick with bad narratives instead of facts and, yes, truth.

Meaning: they're willing to swallow tons of contradictions, plot holes etc. because they want to be convinced by what they're seeing or being told. That enables certain public people to tell them very flimsy stories.

This is not purely about people choosing bad input because it suits them. It's not only about being lied to and believing those lies. It's about being lied to badly and still not letting go of the narrative. Wanting to take it for real so badly.

edit: I'm beginning to realize that people who don't know or haven't known suspension of disbelief will try to explain it with something similar that they're more familiar with.
And it is very similar to things we see happening in so-called political discourse these days, esp. in the USA.
But many have known this since before Trump1.0, see e.g. TVTropes and Wikipedia.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] WatDabney@sopuli.xyz 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Well... yeah. I thonk it's fairly self-evident that individuals have different threaholds for suspension of disbelief, and that the thresholds even vary between subjects with a given individual (for example, it's harder to maintain suspension of disbelief relative to an area in which one has expertise).

But that's not really relevant - I just included "acceptably" to be more precise and accurate.

The relevant part is the core idea that the mechanism by which at least some seemingly rational people support blitheringly insane and factually unsupportable political views is not really some combination of prejudices and biases by which they convince themselves of the nominal truth and correspondence to reality of their beliefs, but by engaging in suspension of disbelief - by entirely switching off the parts of their brain that measure truth and correspondence with reality, just as I do when I read a novel or watch a movie.

I certainly don't know that to be the case, but it's a fascinating possibility