this post was submitted on 29 Jul 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:

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.

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I feel like the people I interact with irl don't even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world -3 points 6 days ago (3 children)

The average person is becoming MORE technologically illiterate, not less.

There's simply no evidence of this

What's more, the prevalence of cheap, accessible technologies is having a host of knock-on effects. Case in point:

People grow up with phones and iPads and kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.

Feels like I'm listening to the Boomer complaining about kids today not knowing how to use a manual transmission.

[–] chickenf622@sh.itjust.works 18 points 6 days ago

I wouldn't say that data is definitive proof. The table is missing ages from 30-under 65 from the table (at least if you're not logged in, if there is a more complete table please share). Also not sure how good some of the questions are for determining tech literacy. Knowing that Elon Musk ran both Tesla and Twitter in April 2023 is more if you keep up with the news rather than knowing how to work a computer. Other ones are good like being able to identify 2FA or knowing what LLM/AI is capable of.

[–] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

My wife is a teacher. Kids come to school without the ability to use keyboard and mouse which was not the case in the 90s. I also only drive manual :P

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Bullshit, I went to school in the 90s, and half my class had never seen a computer before. I'm surprised you don't remember how many kids struggled with Mavis Beacon.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

It's always different when it's your generation. The fact that "keyboard class" was stuffed with Millennials in Freshman year of high school isn't an indictment of kids' keyboarding skills.

Only the Gen Z/A cohort has problems.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

LMFAO, bruh, your categories are 18-29, and 65+.

Your Source literally entirely skips over the age group we're talking about. You're not proving strong literacy skills of any kind atm.

And writing skills are literally entirely different from understanding how a computer works and how to trouble shoot it. Can you name what activity Gen z is doing that's equivalent to texting that is teaching them how to trouble shoot computers that's different then the way millenials learned?

Because the whole point of that comic is that boomers learned to read and write using letters and books but look down at millenials when they read and write short messages to each other constantly, which is also practicing reading and writing. So what activity is Gen z doing that's learning how to trouble shoot things that millenials don't recognize as learning how to trouble shoot things?

(For the record I think the generation difference is wildly overblown in threads like this, but Im also not convinced that it's completely unreal, and I also think boomers still had somewhat of a point that that comic glosses over, and we're all now seeing it with our attention spans and vitriol).