this post was submitted on 30 Apr 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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I mean, can anything exist entirely on its own?
The elements come to mind...
But can a particular element exist, without another element or elementary particle. Like I feel like you can't have hydrogen with out a proton and electron, and you can't have an electron without implying the existence on a proton
Hmm, fine, then... uh, quarks and dark matter? lol.
Laws of nature and the fundamental particles that everything is made of - but also, while a table itself is just a collection of atoms arranged in a convenient shape, the thing we mean by the word "table" is an actual thing that has causal power in the universe. A corner, however, cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to be part of an object rather than an object itself.
You're seeking the word "label," not "thing." At what point does it stop being a table, for example? When you take away 1 leg? 2, 3, all 4 (or more if it's a weird kind of table)? What if the removed legs are right next to it? What if the legs are on the other side of the world and new observers of the former table are unaware of this fact? Will they still call it a table or will the legs' absence alter their perception of the label? What if the legs are simply destroyed? What if an object was not originally built to be a table but someone said, "Hey, that's a table," and others around agree with them? Unga-bunga: the invention of language, the messy art of labeling. There is no real, objective table, just as there is no corner; we merely label it as such. Even for a long time I myself confused desks and tables until I realized that desks are basically tables meant to only be used from one side. They're all just made-up labels, every single noun out there.
And even with corners, at what point does it become no longer a corner? When 1cm is shaved off to round it? 2, 3? It therefore actually has substance because you can round it out, but all of these are ultimately labels/descriptors just driven by group consensus to make sense of the world.
The Greek Ship of Theseus comes to mind (fully renovate a dilapidated ship, piece by piece; in the end, is it still the same ship?). These are all human labels based on feelings. Nothing exists independently apart from conscious, sentient minds that apply, and remove, such labels.