On the flip side, you've probably met someone who has saved a person's life.
Showerthoughts
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.
I saved my self a bunch of times by convincing my self to not kill myself.
Does that count?
Used to work with the criminally insane. I've also met a LOT of pedophiles. Not many because they actually were crazy but because they were trying to get declared as such to not get fucked up in prison. Most of them aren't even actually attracted to children they just wanna victimize someone and children are smaller / weaker and less able to advocate for themselves. The one thing pretty much all of them have in common is a pitiful combination of sadism and cowardice.
If you’re old enough you’ve definitely met someone who has done at least one murder. The question is intent as you’ve said: did you meet the drunk driver or the serial killer with 50 bodies in the basement who hasn’t been caught.
Also this applies to rape and that is far more common because it is simply less reported. One of your buddies might be a person that has straight up forced a person to have sex, maybe violently
It is quite likely that someone I knew either killed a person, or had them killed.
Said potential murderer is dead for a few years now and tbh I don't think anyone wants to uncover this mystery anymore. Since the whole thing was very long ago, it's easier to just ignore it instead of ruining everyone's memory of a person. The other person who could've done it has been dead for a decade or 2 too.
Ok, storytime please
Let's just say some people I know lost their mother at a very early age and when one of them finally asked the father about it 30 years later, his explanation was "well person X was at work that night, ask him". Person X being a business partner of his, somewhat of a low-end organized crime guy. Dead for like 10-15 years at that point.
When I say lost, I mean she hasn't been found decades later. Not even a body.
Early 90s were a crazy ass time here in Estonia.
There's more details I know, but honestly if I go too into detail and the story makes its way out of our tiny community here, people who know about the whole thing will instantly figure out who I am and who I'm talking about and I don't want that. Not because I'm in any danger from anyone - just because I don't want it to happen.
When I was 18/19 in college, I met a guy through my brother's work that was in his mid 40's. We hung out with him and his girlfriend a lot and he was pretty good friends with my brother. He even met my mom and family, helped her with some construction projects she needed done (dad died when I was 15, so she didn't have that extra help), and was invited to her wedding to my step dad.
Now we knew that this guy was an ex-con (the restaurant my brother worked at hired a lot of ex-cons), but we never really judged or pried into what happened. Honestly, this guy was always just chill, giving, funny, helpful, and respectful. I never got creeped out by him, and i never felt like he was inappropriate with me. We found out through a mutual friend later that this guy used to get paid to bleach the bodies of girls/women that had been raped and killed by others. To this mutual friend's knowledge, our friend hadn't actually done any raping/killing, but I was really struggling to feel much comfort in the fact that he "only" helped guys get away with it. Especially because I was a young, petite college girl at the time.
Anyways, I dont directly know of anybody ive met that has killed someone, but the fact that I know of somebody that did this horrible thing makes me think that you're correct.
I killed someone. It's a called a dead name for a reason.
I once gave a friend of a friend a condescending chewing-out after they did something hurtful.
Some time later our mutual friend informed me that they had died, but declined to tell me the cause of death.
Much later I discovered it was self-caused.
... Were my words too much? We spend our lives trying to be more effective communicators. What if we're too effective when it matters most?
I took a flight back from Europe with a colleague years ago, we talked for hours. A year later he was found guilty of killing his wife with cyanide.
People do a great job of hiding their demons in a professional setting.

Yea, you know Sir Alec Guinness (the actor that played Obi-Wan) has killed a few people. He wouldnt call WW2 his "best performance" if he didnt take a few baddies out.
Two people, in fact. First was a Hell's Angels enforcer. Had lunch at a Chinese restaurant with him and a few other people from my former Kung Fu school. Apparently he was a former student and credibly accused of murdering a rival biker gang member, but the jury was hung and couldn't convict.
Second was none other than Shrimp Boy, after he got released from prison for the murders he committed but before he got locked up again for the racketeering charges. Met in in Chinatown literally a few days before the feds closed in on him. Shared a cup of tea with him without knowing his identity and didn't find out until someone present told me who he was days later.
I wonder how many people who have themselves unknowingly caused a death, though some thoughtless or innocuous action. E.g. a discarded banana peel causes another person to later slip and fall with a fatal result.
the number of people who fall into this category through their use of stock LED headlights is non-zero
My ex-brother-in-law killed a family of four while DUI. The cops really screwed up the investigation so he was able to get the charges down to a minor moving violation. He never saw the inside of a jail.
When I was in high school a friend of a friend that I knew and had hung out with at a couple of times was a serial killer/rapist. He was one of the last people executed by that state.
Edit: My grandfather killed some Nazis in WW2. Several former coworkers killed people in the line of duty as soldiers. And, I worked as a records clerk at a nursing home, so I knew several doctors and nurses that had taken people off life support.
I've been a lawyer for over 20 years... So, I've met more than a couple.
I have. I used to drink with someone who later killed someone while drinking.
Carl can fuck right off.
I've met multimillionaires before so yes, thousands of people probably
I have killed someone. My mother. It was intentional, legal and sanctioned. She was at the end of her life, suffering from Alzheimers and her entire family was present. I volunteered, as her only living child, to pull the plug. And I did. Did I kill someone? Yes. Was it the best thing to do at the time? Yes. Do you wonder if that's a good way to go out of this world? Probably. Would you be wrong? Yes.
When I was younger my grandmother died of cancer. She wanted to pass at home and we lived with her.
For months she just declined, until she was bed-bound in the living room, having carers and family members feed her, clean her after she pooped on herself, sometimes randomly screaming in pain, having nightmares, and was largely incoherent. In the last week she didn’t have the strength to eat and her doctors told us to just stop feeding her. She had a death rattle that lasted for days and echoed through the house every time she breathed, until finally something just gave out.
It was not dignified. It was not peaceful. It was deeply traumatizing. I wish we could cut her suffering short somehow – for us as much as her.
You have definitely met someone who will kill themselves in the end. The rate is about 1/70 people in the US, and for every successful suicide there are 32 attempts of varying seriousness.
Had a buddy that couldn't take the pain anymore and he had enough drink and anxiety meds one night and he just never woke up.
He made sure to turn on his music extra loud so it'd bother his neighbors so his cat would be okay and would be rehomed.
He was a good guy.
I've met two people who took their own lives.
My mom shot herself with her husbands gun.
My moms father shot himself with his rifle.
If you're an engineer you've almost certainly contributed meaningfully to the death of someone.
I would think not if you're a good engineer.
Even the code of Hammurabi had the death penalty for engineers that caused the death of another through poor design.
Well something tells me Hammurabi wasn't aware of drone bombs, so forgive me if I skip over that asshole's opinion on things.
There's a lot of industries out there, most of them are bad. Whether it's oil&gas, aerospace, automotive, even basic scientific research...pretty much always ends up doing harm. Pure software engineering isn't any better off -- I mean every engineer who worked at Facebook in the 2010s has their hands bloodied with a genocide they facilitated. Or people who work on ring, or other doorbells, being used by ICE to hunt, torture, and in some cases kill, immigrants. A DOORBELL.
Humans do terrible things, engineers enable humans. You can easily claim there was no way to predict the path from doorbells to murder, but...wait, no, the EFF predicted this from the moment go. So you have engineers warned their work would do harm, they keep working, their work does harm. That's meaningful contribution from my pov.
I know a train operator. They are sometimes involuntary involved in other peoples suicide.
I work in healthcare, I've removed... so many people from life support. I often wonder if that's, not the same, but...
I drive now! Good luck everyone else!
I had a co-worker at one of my first big boy jobs working for a hospital, and this guy was weird as weird could be.
He was an older man, probably in his late fifties at the earliest, and we worked in the IT department, and he would blast Avril Lavigne music non-stop.
To make this worse, he wouldn't stop even if you asked him to, and he didn't talk to people, he was rough, he was mean, he was grouchy, he was unapproachable.
About a year after I started, he disappeared one day.
I asked my co-workers about him, and the truth finally came out.
Apparently, about six months before I started, he had gotten into a car accident and killed two people in the car accident, and he was found at fault for drinking and driving.
The reason he was not in jail at the time was his trial was still going through, and the weekend before he disappeared, his trial commenced, he was found guilty and he was sentenced.
And, yeah, as far as I am aware, he is still in jail today if he's still alive.
About a year later, one of my other co-workers was murdered by his wife and their pastor, and it became nationwide news.
I knew a guy who got imprisoned for murder, really nice guy, the way he described it was an armed robbery where the armed person got spooked and fired off a shot. They were arrested on the road while taking the victim to the hospital (they weren't trying to hurt anyone) and ended up getting booked for murder and kidnapping.
I met him a few years after he got out on probation.
Edit: fixed a typo
Significantly more likely if you live in the USA. Not so much in big parts of the rest of the world.
Yeah and several of them were my kin and were murderers. My kin were the folks who you went to when you needed someone dealt with, hell I wouldn't be surprised if my great great aunt killed someone as a favor to the Hells Angels back in the day. Let alone some of the kin I'm less close, I know at least one of them ended up in prison for murder back in the day due to some such Berdoo nonsense. Funny enough a kinsman who I only met once was also in Prison at some point and was on the bad side of the law into old age threatened to kill my sperm donor, glad he didn't kill stealing is a step to far and that sombitch belongs either to my grandmother or myself.
As far as i know, i have met only one person like this.
A guy i knew in "highschool" (kinda equilevant) killed his friend a few years later while both were drunk and had just come out of sauna. He thought that his girlfriend had cheated on him with the other guy and woops, axe to the back.
Met a guy after he got out of prison for drunk driving and killing someone. I don't know the details but he wouldn't go anywhere near alcohol, so at least he's trying to be better.
Also I have met quite a few War Veterans over the years.
If you want to test this, start up conversations with the combat vets around you. You might not like the answers. That's the vast majority of killers I've known (that I've known).
Unless you live in a civilised country where guns aren’t everywhere and not everyone is a war vet.

I've met many people that have killed people. I didn't think that was all that unusual. I know for sure two people I've met had killed people and there's a whole bunch more that range from maybe to probably.
