this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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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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Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think tit for tat was written from the perspective of nation vs nation decision-making.
It assumes you have roughly equivalent power, i.e. person vs person or business vs business.
I don't think it applies in person vs boss, or mom 'n pop shop vs international conglomerate.
It depends on how you abstract. I believe that small patterns are strongly indicative of larger patterns. My life experiences have largely reflected this pattern. All of my worst business encounters were with people that cheated on their partners in their personal life. They ultimately showed the same types of behavior in business. The best people I have worked for were exactly the opposite. This includes both while running my own business for years and many people I have worked for as an employee.
The concept is also an extension of my realization that anyone that likes to talk about everyone else negatively at work when one on one, is doing the exact same thing with every other individual when I am not around and is saying the same negative stuff about me. Such a person appears to be everyone's friend on a personal level, but is actually stabbing everyone in the back equally to elevate themselves and increase their own awareness of weaknesses they might highlight or play against others. The act of talking negatively about everyone else is a strike or vector that will later manifest if given the opportunity or under pressure.
I am metaphorically applying Newton's premise that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, to the probability of future human behavior. If the person indicates a certain vector of thought that causes damage, they tilt the scales of future interaction and are therefore some degree more likely than not to produce a suboptimal future compared to others with a more positive track record, character, and ethics.
As long as they punch down and kiss up to the right people, assholes can usually reduce "tit for tat" to "tit for slap-on-the-wrist".
I agree you that they are more likely than not to produce a suboptimal future.
I just disagree with the premise that "winning less" is the same as tit for tat.
I totally respect anyone that chooses to limit their perspective scope.
For me, everything in life is a messy statistical abstraction. I would not go out of my way to make decisions or inconvenience myself in instances where I see vectors of negativity and small errors in ethical disposition. These are simply elements I passively note, and when faced with a choice, such past occurrences will weigh into my decisions.
For me, I struggle to recall specifics like memorized trivia, instances of certain behaviors, or even people's names in conversational real time. I can recall most of this information if I try, but I must focus on it to do so. I instantly have access to my abstracted thoughts and oversimplifications that exist on something like a three dimensional roadmap. When I note these types of behaviors, it is like I am painting a picture of what driving down a familiar street feels like, and I remember that picture and place well, only that imagery is the actions of the person. It takes me a while to think about all the features that make up that place, but I know where I am and what that means just by visiting. The person is not any feature but an ambiance that exists in my mind. It is their identity to me. I may not recall the name feature well, but this is not who they are to me; they are an abstraction like everything else; a likely set of probabilities, but one where I'm always curious how they evolve or add new features. No one is static after all, unless they are dead. Still I weigh negative vectors into those statistics objectively and make predictions based upon them.
Fair enough. I get overwhelmed by all the ethical questions that come with being in the real world.
My partner outsourced most of that mental work and focused on trying to be a good person from moment to moment. I think she would've broadly agreed with you from a karma standpoint.