this post was submitted on 14 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
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- 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
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If I understand you correctly, I think "people don't easily comprehend the significance of increasing orders of magnitude" is a better way to frame it. To use iii's examples, people perceive a coffee that costs 5 as being 1 unit more than a coffee costing 4. But when comparing two cars costing 40000 and 50000, the human brain tends to just latch on to the most significant digit, and starts to see it the same way: just one unit more.
Tangentially, given our brains' difficulty processing large numbers, I wonder if this effect leads to money management skills being worse on average in economies with smaller base currency units, such as the Japanese Yen, Indian Rupee, South Korean Won, or for an extreme case study, the Iranian Rial, which currently exchanges at 49,313 IRR ≈ 1 EUR. When your haircut costs 1200000, a new phone costs 18700000, and a new car costs 1331400000, it's hard to judge the weight of your decisions. When the slightly nicer car costs 1645200000, it's near impossible to notice that you just spent your coffee money for an entire year (~5 days a week for 50 weeks) on a moonroof and Apple CarPlay. Not sure if that example is applicable to the average Iranian, but eh.