this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
35 points (90.7% liked)

Showerthoughts

40646 readers
1057 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
 

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 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)

I think this is a fascinating idea.

And I just tried to explain it to a friend and she didn't get it, then I came back to the thread to find respondents who didn't get it in the same way she didn't.

She kept trying to warp it into something like confirmation bias, even though I kept trying to get her to see that the significant thing about suspension of disbelief is that truth and reality don't even enter into it - they aren't even meaningful concepts.

The only thing that's necessary when disbelief is suspended is that the narrative remain acceptably internally consistent. Whether itt true or not or corresponds with reality or not is entirely irrelevant, since the entire process of expectng and testing for those qualities has been set aside.

Again, that's a fascinating idea. I've long suspected that Trump is unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, but that that was a consequence of his narcissism and egotism - that effectively the only measure he has for truth or falsehood is whether he believes something to be true or not - that the concept of consensual reality isn't even coherent in his entirely self-absorbed internal reality.

But I've long wondered how the at least somewhat more sane people following him manage it. Something like confirmation bias would only work up to a point that Trump has long since gone beyond.

And I think you might be on to something - just as I do when I sit down to read a novel or watch a movie or a series, when they start engaging in politics, they switch the parts of their brains that track truth and reality entirely off and instead just follow along with the narrative, whatever it might be.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 6 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

But I’ve long wondered how the at least somewhat more sane people following him manage it. Something like confirmation bias would only work up to a point that Trump has long since gone beyond.

Yeah this exactly.

Something else that might play into it: so many conspiracy nuts refer to movies as if they were history, or prophecy, or scientific research. As if they were valid in a way they clearly aren't, because they're fiction. Maybe they really do live in a world where these things are interchangeable.

[–] LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago

Maybe they really do live in a world where these things are interchangeable.

This exactly. Learning programming was a HUGE hit to my understanding and trust of myself.

Most people don't go through the visceral experience of seeing how shitty the human experience lines up with reality. Such people absolutely believe in bullshit for the simple reason that it feels correct.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)