this post was submitted on 03 Oct 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
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The number of days in a week wasn’t chosen as an arbitrary number, it was chosen because it’s the length of 1 moon phase. 4 phases of the moon is 1 cycle (new moon to new moon), or 1 month (28 days).
The fact that we now have most months with 30 or 31 days is basically a hack to try to line up 12 months to 1 year (1 orbital period of the earth), but that was never going to work!
13 months would have been 13x28=364 days which could just have an extra filler day (or two when needed for leap years).
Congrats you ~~invested~~ invented International Fixed calendar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Edit: typo
How do I invest too, I want in.
And then we have a prime number of months. Checkmate OP
FYI, there is kind of a push toward this, usually by landlords and other bill collectors, who would just love to be able to charge an extra month of rent or bills each year.
There's no way in Hell under the current leadership in many parts of the world that bills would be multiplied by 12, then divided by 13, and then capped at that. The cap wouldn't work anyway. The only responsible way to do it would be to charge bills on an annual basis, and divide it by the "number of months" for the "convenience" of the consumer. Then it would just be set up to where all the monthly payments would go down. But yeah, no way they enforce that.
Oh, shit, I was finding the 13-month year a great idea until you made me think about the consequences...
Weekly and bi-weekly pay cycles are much more common than monthly or semi-monthly. It would be easier to budget if bills directly corresponded to pay cycles.
Maybe in the US. In Europe its either monthly or annually
Same here in south america. Never heard of weekly payments.
That's metric months.
By that logic, the length of the week would have to be variable, since the phases don’t line up perfectly with the day night cycle. Most of the time, it could be 7 days, but occasionally you would get a bonus day.
It's 29.5 days for the moon cycle, not 28.
https://moonlightphase.com/guide/lunar-cycle
Eh, that doesn't really answer it. Months are about 30 days long. First, there are better numbers than 7 to fit in 30. Five 6 says weeks would work much better for this. Second, moon "phases" are completely arbitrary. Really there are only two "phases", waxing and waning; anything else is arbitrary subdivisions.
The real reason there are seven days in the week is because there are seven moving objects in the sky. (From a human perspective.) There are seven days of the week:
These are the seven days of the week. They're named for the seven great moving lights in the heavens. Everything else is a fixed star or invisible to human eyes.
Wasn't (Julius) Caesar and some other dude responsibles for adding 2 months to the year (Augustus I guess) ?
Yes, Augustus. But they didnt add months; they renamed existing months, and also got days added to them by taking off from the last month - which was February at that time. Related fun fact: September, October, November, and December are just names from the root words in Latin for 7, 8, 9, and 10 because they were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months. When the calendar was rearranged to start with January, it threw that off.
Time keeping back in the day was wild. Let's just jumo 8 days, change everything and so on lol.
So there were already 12 months before the julius/augustus, interesting!
Eh, don't forget that Julius and Augustus Caesar made months for themselves (July and August). Or is that made up? I'm not really sure. It's an interesting story though. But Sept- means seven, Oct- means eight, Nov- means nine, and Dec- means ten, so it stands to reason that July and August were disruptively added somehow.
The Roman calendar originally didn’t last all year round. It began in the spring and ended at the start of winter, and then the winter period just didn’t exist on the calendar.
Calendars were invented to plan the growing of crops, so tracking the days in winter didn’t have any purpose, so they left winter out.
That's also why the months are numbered wrong. If you know Latin, or at least one of the romance languages that derived from Latin, then "Septem"ber should be the 7th month, "Octo"ber should be the 8th month, "Novem"ber should be the ninth month, and "Decem"ber should be the 10th month. But that's not how it works today, as we no longer count March as the first month of the year.
Pretty sure it was religion, rest on the seventh day.
Babylonians divided their lunar months into 4 weeks, the number seven was significant as the number of celestial bodies they could see other than non-moving stars. It wasn't until later that the seventh day got any association with resting.
I read about it in a few places it this sums it up: https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-we-have-seven-days-in-a-week
That whole article is reaching. Like holy cow. "7 celestial bodies, therefore!!1!" I forget the proper name of it, but it's backwards looking. The lunar cycle holds a little bit, but they could have broken 29.6 days into any number of parts for any reason.
It's because 7 days of work (6 days 1 day off) is the maximum we can work, and then we wrote it backwards into religion and everything else.
That's not the best source necessarily but I read a few, maybe they did have the 6 and 1 days because of our working ability, but to say that would be an assumption whereas there are records about the reasoning of the seven days being based on the primary celestial objects in our sky. Why do you assume that's the maximum we can work? Plenty of people have worked more or less in different societies or careers.