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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- 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.
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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