this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
-31 points (28.8% liked)
Showerthoughts
41844 readers
1527 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:
- 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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No because we feel like we are on a downward trajectory...
yep. Rand calls it neomedievalism, where we're going back to the peasant/noble tiers
Ayn Rand????
Nope! Corporation Rand
Yeah I was like. Wait. What.
That's the trouble. We feel like we are, but in fact, we are not. Hunger has decreased incredibly over the last decades. Infectious diseases are way down. The standard of living is way up over the last three decades. The tools and technologies available to us are far beyond what former generations even dreamed of. Global conflict deaths are down. The average lifespan has double since 1900.
Which is another way of saying child mortality is down, but wait! Look what direction that is trending!
Food insecurity is currently a big problem for American children and families.
We just ended vaccine mandates, ended funding for RNA vaccines, and infectious diseases are on the rise.
And largely are subscription services designed to prey on us rather than make life easier. I have a robot vacuum that takes more effort and maintenance than my grandparents' Electrolux ever did.
Starting in the year 1900 and going back 300 000 years, would you trade places with the average human on Earth?
Who cares? I can’t time travel.
Food is available but becoming unaffordable. Ownership is being taken away. Simply existing is taking all our wages and then some.
There’s no point in technological progression if it is only being used to extract my life for someone else’s gain.
The point is, you wouldn't because any time before that, the average human worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, lived to about 50, had no doctors, no indoor toilet, no indoor water. Water was likely a long distance away and had to be carried by hand to your hovel. You were a serf or serf-like or a slave. Worker's rights were virtually non-existant. You had intestinal parasites with no health care to relieve you. You were at the whim of the wealthy. Up to half of children didn't make it to the age of 5. 4 % of women died in childbirth. There were no cars, no planes, no electricity, virtually no leisure time. There was minimal heat in winter, no cooling in summer. We are indeed fortunate to be living now.
Keep in mind that your average life expectancy stats include child mortality rates. If you could survive childhood, you had a good chance at living to be over 50.
Frankly, I think my dad's generation had it better. And I think I have it better than my millennial kids. And it looks like they will have it better than my teens.
I wouldn't probably say I'd trade places with the average person because there are a lot of poor folks who have things worse than me. But quality is life in America is getting worse.
Everything you've mentioned is going back up again.
Fun fact: when research showed that vaccination against Covid results in way fewer hospital admissions, Trump blocked the publication.