this post was submitted on 24 Jun 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
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.
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Same, but also I've noticed that all those years at university of, "Not typing like you speak," isnt helpful online. I know it makes me look like a robot. Even just using a higher level vocabulary is sus.
I'd rather be who I am than let all this bullshit force me to play dumb. I earned my ability to speak (somewhat) intelligently, and I'm not going to let the AI bros discredit that effort. I, for one, refuse to contribute to the Idiocracy outcome the control freaks want.
For me it depends on the context. I love words, and it's a mathematical fact that there are more long words than short ones, and I love using all of them. But, I also love communicating with people, and if I can use a word that most people know instead of a word most people don't know and it works well enough, I prefer to simplify. I have a tendency to indulge my own vocabulary and I think consciously minding it makes me a better communicator.
There's some fine nuance to finding that balance, though. If the word I want to use is less well-known, but better fits what I'm trying to say (or is significantly shorter than "going the long way around"), then I'm more likely to use it. I think most everybody should strive to communicate as clearly as possible, and that may entail learning the occasional new word. Intentionally "talking down" can be insulting, as well as a step towards Idiocracy if we all start doing it together.
I get that it's appropriate in certain situations, or for certain audiences, but I try to stretch my brain to keep it learning (and therefore more sharp), and I hope most others strive to better their communication skills as well. IMHO it's necessary both to succeed, and to evolve.
Yeah, I think of it kind of like protocol negotiation. If I speak a technical protocol my conversation partner doesn't, my options are either to get them using my protocol, I switch to a common protocol, or we don't speak. Sometimes, if the topic is important enough, the first and third options are preferable. Other times, particularly in casual conversation, I opt for the second one. I still try to be precise, and that can mean an occasional specialty word and accompanying definition, but it's costly to the conversation and if I'm not careful I can get bogged down in explaining minutia instead of getting to my point. Maybe it's more like treating new concepts economically rather than treating jargon as a discrete protocol, though I tend to think of jargons as protocols, you can kind of add them into a common protocol a la carte. They're just computationally expensive for people absorbing them if they're also trying to follow a conversational thread at the same time, and too many can blow the budget and cause people to tap out, so I try to add only the ones I really need.
Interesting analogy. Basically, yeah - you've got to tailor how you speak to the specific topic, participants, and goals you have for what you're trying to convey. There's no overriding universal truth, and adaptability certainly makes for a good communicator.
Paragraphs help. Please, for the sanity of your readers use paragraphs (appropriately).
I've gotten critiques that I write in walls of text, occasionally, but that just looks like a single normally-sized paragraph to me. Maybe I'm just old. I am using a desktop browser on a 4k monitor, so maybe that has something to do with it. Just eyeballing it it looks like several mobile screens worth of text, maybe it should be broken up for mobile viewers. I guess there's a paragraph break for the last two sentences... but it's seven sentences total. Is that too much for one paragraph?
I measure what should constitute a paragraph by what I'm talking about. If I move on to another point that's not directly part of the point I've been talking about — even though they're likely directly related — I tend to start a new paragraph to make it easier to follow along with what I'm talking about, as well as make it easier to tell one point from another.