this post was submitted on 12 Sep 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:
- 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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In these examples, the ideal scenarios described aren't any more logical or empathetic than the real scenario. All you're saying is that particular people are more deserving of empathy than the people who are affected by their actions.
That's the problem if they didn't consider the limitations. It's a irrational expectation for the bus to be 100% efficient and always on time. Nothing is 100% efficient. It'd be a faulty expectation to assume that things (other than death, disease, aging, etc.) are certain or guaranteed.
Everyone deserves empathy. All sentient beings, including this hypothetical man.
Again, all people deserve empathy. It seems that you're making this a binary, "either/or", dilemma when I believe both the angry transit operator and the smoker are "not ideal", though I do have a bias toward the anger because that is aesthetically uglier than the smoking.
They did, and planned for it to the best of their abilities given the available resources. Being disabled doesn't mean you stop trying to be a functional human being. The illogical thing to do is to sit at home and do nothing because you're not 100% certain that things will go well. Because as you said,
So should we not strive to make things as predictable as possible?
And yet, your ideal scenarios, you keep favouring one person/group at the expense of another. I don't know if empathy is the word you actually mean to use. You can empathize with everyone while still favouring specific people, but your examples suggest that you're using "empathy" to mean the actions you take (or don't take) to help someone rather than the emotional state. In that case, it's is indeed a binary either/or. In your examples, what you do to help one person will negatively affect others.