this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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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 analogy is flawed:
The car gave mere humans superhuman traveling abilities.
AI gives Big Tech unprecedented surveillance power and control over the entire society, but puts people out of work and debases everything it touches.
Cars empowered people. AI empowers corporate fascists.
Cars empowered people at first.
But look at every single american town or city and you will see that it crippled them, made them dependent and robbed them of their freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
Maybe you should post this showerthought in the "fuck cars" community where more people might agree with your hot take.
Otherwise most of us know that cars are what you make of them. You can choose to walk a few miles a few times a week to run errands, even if you have the option to drive. This is how I live my life. I guess I live in what some people would call a "15 minute city" where everything we need is within walkable distance. So we're all healthy fit & get fresh air & exercise every day simply by living here. I also have this automobile to drive me over 100 miles in 2 hours which is what I'm doing tonight which would be impossible for me to walk or run or bike that distance in 2 hours.
I wouldn't exactly call this a hot take showerthought if you look at how many studies there already are that show the effects of car dependency in most of north america.
I am german, my work place is 700m away from where i live, the next supermarket is 450 meters away and i don't live in a big city where those numbers could go down to under 100m.
So, i know that my "hot take" is not true for most parts of the world. But my statement was specifically about american cities and towns. There is also the very big problem of segregation of incomes. If you can't afford a car, you can't afford to live in certain neighborhoods because you simply can't walk 15 minutes to the next supermarket or to your work.
And i cannot NOT call this crippling and robbing of freedom.
I am 100% with you on the fact that cars also enable freedom. And as i much as i rely on public transport, i also enjoy the freedom of simply hopping into my car and drive exactly where i want and when i want.
But depending on where you live, a car is a necessity instead of a "freedom-enabler" and that... is crippling....
That is great that you live in a walkable area. They were saying that cars have destroyed areas by making them non walkable. And that's not necessarily the residents fault, and a lot of the people that live there probably want it do be different but aren't able to move.
Cars don't empower people. We've had "super human" travailing abilities long before the car. Cars take away freedom. I don't understand how being forced to use one method of travel for daily commute is empowering.
I've come to dislike the word empowered. In recent times it is, more often than not, used to gaslight people into accepting something that has far more negative consequences than positive.
So obviously you don't like cars, that's fine, I respect that. But your comment makes no sense. It's like if I said, "I don't like cake, I don't understand how being forced to eat cake every day is enjoyable."
Having a car does not force you to drive it. Not having a car forces you to NOT drive it.
You can hate cars, hell, you can hate me just for having one, but saying it FORCES you to drive it everyday is just nonsense.
It's not your or any others singular car forcing anyone to drive. It's the expectation that an adult person can drive and needs to use a car that forces or at least pushes everything towards driving.
If the design and soundscape of almost any space weren't impacted negatively by cars I wouldn't think they'd be forcing anything onto me. But that is reality even in nominally not car dependent inner city Germany. So that's why I hate cars.
You're.. what? You're not forced to work where you work; you can change to a closer workplace. Cars made it possible at all to go as far as you can for work. How do they remove freedom if they increase your options for where you can go?
I wonder if the most objective viewpoint is just that of neutrality; it's not better nor worse but just different. EVs sourcing from nuclear energy are probably objectively better.
", in theory." Should probably be added to the statement that you can change workplaces. Cost of living, availability of good paying jobs, and a variety of factors work into that flow.
~~AI~~ LLMs empower little people, too, though. They've taught me spreadsheet formulas and ways to use them at my job that I didn't even know existed. Granted, I didn't take any Excel course, and they didn't always work on their own (as expected of LLMs), but they at least gave me enough ideas to find out superior ways to manage my daily data.
That’s like saying getting injured in a car accident empowered you because it taught you humility.
Like props on finding the silver lining but it is objectively not a good thing for you and you shouldn’t view the event with gratitude
That's a wild analogy. How did it hurt me versus finally solving my frustration from being unable to find solutions online? I check manually first...
And it does not take away jobs because it messes up too much anyway in deeper stuff. Those who were laid off will be back soon enough, probably with better employers. All the "replacement" going on in big tech is only mounting technical debt from its incompetence; the bubble will burst spectacularly over the coming months or years. With that said, for bite-sized, instantly verifiable tasks, I think it's mostly okay if you at least tried to figure out the solution on your own first.
It harms you in the form of directly causing cognitive decline.
Just look at the way you have advocated for it within this very comment. You argue that it’s a valid “pressure release valve”, an avenue to seek solutions when you are otherwise frustrated.
Those moments, the ones where you have seemingly exhausted all possibilities, are the ones where your mind starts working. You are training yourself to interrupt the process. You can tell yourself this story about how you attempted to make an effort first, but the truth is your patience for that will get smaller every day.
And then what’s the plan? Why would I hire someone who is ultimately totally interchangeable with all the other prompters who can only forward what AI told them? Why would I give you a raise when I could just replace you with someone equally capable of reading off “AI solutions”?
Where are these “better employers” who will “probably” save you going to come from, and why would they bother? Is that assessment based on anything in particular? Why go to bat like this over something you can only call “mostly okay” for particularly small tasks?
People argued the same about calculators.
Is this just your bit? Make an inflammatory quip then edit in an entirely different paragraph after the person responds?
And in turn, people have employed this exact counterargument for each and every single one of the scams the owner class has attempted to employ in recent memory, from the metaverse, to crypto, to NFTs, and now to chatbots that tell you how very special and smart you are. “Industrial revolution was a very good thing! Therefore this totally unrelated and unproven proposal is equally very good! Yayyyy!”
Go read Richard Dawkin’s new article where he convinced himself his chatbot was sentient because it told him he asked the most intelligent questions of anyone on earth. Or look up the direct studies on the cognitive harm being caused, hey, for the time being AI can probably even help collate them for you