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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 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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- 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
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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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I will also dissent on this. I've been homeless. I've lived in a rural subsistence community in West Africa where everyone lived on $1 a day. Material items and money do not define freedom.
Your premise is based on a wealthy materialist American mindset. Billions of people, every day, grind just to survive, and yet can still find joy in their lives. A lot of times that's through basic human connection. Visit any of the poorest places on the planet, and it doesn't take much to get people to stop and take notice and smile. To experience joy. Joy is free. Freedom is the ability to have your own emotions, thoughts, and feelings.
Before you get all up about someone keeping them down to prevent some Marxist paradise, please keep in mind that rain-fed agriculture is a gamble many people play with their lives every day. A large, large number of humans grind against the weather. Not as slaves to anyone else.
And, rest assured, there are wealthy people who are miserable and wear "golden handcuffs" because they are stuck doing something they don't love to maintain an above-average standard of living. Fuck - how many of those stupid Housewives shows are there, filled to overflowing with wealthy people showing you in grotesque detail how money and material trap people in pain and emotional suffering, exploited like an emaciated lion in a zoo.
What can YOU do for free to enjoy your freedom? Here's a fun one, go dumpster diving! You'll find cool shit! Some of it you can sell - that's free money, my guy! You can forage for herbs and food, that's always fun once you know what to look for. Oh, you can make hooch from the stuff you find! You can plant the seeds of rotten tomatoes and start a garden. Go with a friend and you might just enjoy yourself. Or go volunteer at a place that feeds the homeless and talk to the people there and get an idea of how much freedom some of them have exactly because they have changed their mindset. Freedom doesn't mean acceptance by society. It's not 1:1 that you are free and loved or free and appreciated, or free and wealthy or free and even fucking smart. But you can taste freedom and realize that only you can bestow it on yourself.
You and you alone own your actions, thoughts and words. What are you doing with them?
I understand that believing these things may have helped you cope psychologically with the stress of being homeless, but that doesn't make them any less fucking stupid
Do you need Marxism to be the only answer?
I've never been called stupid for being homeless as a child before.
You haven't been called stupid for being homeless as a child yet. My previous comment called the rationalizations you used to make yourself feel better about your circumstances as a child stupid. Right now I'm calling you stupid for continuing to cling to them as an adult, and for your poor reading comprehension which is also probably to blame for your lack of enthusiasm for Marx.
You...
So you have an axe to grind and simply won't accept anything other than your brand of groupthink.
Then, my apologies for not realizing you were from a .ml instance earlier.
Um, so I'm threatened with a terrible no good downvote you've already given me, and mean words, unless I conform to your groupthink? lol. Tell me more about who's free and who isn't while expressing how trapped you are mentally, monetarily, and emotionally. You're welcome to call me stupid for choices my parents made as a child, as it only shows how you've tried to apply the label sticky-side out.
Perhaps your reading of Marx was too shallow, as to skip that socialism fetishizes material goods and materialism to the point where it seeks to control all of it. It's every bit as materialist as capitalism, otherwise it wouldn't care at all about who controls the means of production at all.
Indeed, and failed socialist governments proved the point time and again for a century that they were every bit as materialist, in some ways, much more so. Religion is inherently non-material; it's spiritual, yes? That's a pretty easy definition to agree on, that Invisible Sky Daddy is non-corporeal, right? I can attend any temple or church I want and never give them money. Some say I should, and that's between me and Invisible Sky Daddy. Or, even better, I can be a pagan out in the forest praising nature, or a Buddhist. Socialism makes those things illegal exactly because they're non-material and therefore not subject to control of the materialistic state. Music, movies, all media is regulated by the state because it might give you non-material feels about life and hope and joy. That media can only fetishize the materialism of the state and those who lived lives doing so.
Definitely don't change your mind. it's OK, I promise, that hate will burn you up from the inside and give you nothing to show for it.
;D
Lol that's a whole lot of words for someone who clearly doesn't have a fucking clue what he's talking about, a feat in its own right. You haven't read jack shit, you clearly don't know anything about socialism or capitalism for that matter. The smart and honest thing to do would be to just admit that and then fix it, but you're neither of those.
It's great that you found a way to be happy in the situation you were in. Personally, I wouldn't have been. All the time I don't have to spend worrying about whether I can feed my kids, or give them a roof over their heads, or worrying about them getting sick and me not being able to afford treatment, I use for things that enrich my life. I spend it with friends and family, I read books, every now and then I travel to a place I haven't been to before.
If you consider wanting to feed your kids and spend time with family materialistic, fine. But some folks need such shallow materialistic things to be happy. I'm one of them.
That's 100% not what anyone considers materialistic.
Obviously, feed your children. Feed yourself. That's not materialism, that's surviving. I'm not talking about starving as some moral high ground.
I'm talking about people who stress about not going to brunch or having the latest whatever BS phone. That is materialism.
It sounds like you actually agree with "if people can't afford to do anything, that's not freedom", then.
Nope, very much the opposite. But I also know how materialism is defined and not many people in this thread seem to, through will or ignorance, neither would surprise me.
Taking a step back, this thread is tankie catnip for people who only think materialism=capitalism, and capitalism=the only bad thing ever. Sorry that this is how you find out, but socialist governments have been and remain hard materialists as well. More so than capitalists in some ways. The easiest example is that non-material social groups - religions - are generally illegal. Regardless of your personal thoughts on that, science, the "religion of materialism" is permitted. The only non-material fetishization is generally around the Party. Socialism in general is all about not letting people decide their own fates with regard to material goods at all, but having the state command all aspects of production.
If people in a capitalist country can't afford to do anything then they're in an economic prison. We can agree on that, right? But the bars of that prison, short of medical issues, are bars of your own making. If you move to a hippie commune, is that a zoo in a world where everyone is in their own prison? Or is that simply another kind of prison because they might have rules about helping out with time and effort? Those are costs, too.