this post was submitted on 28 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
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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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.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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Seems like there's plenty of entitled wealthy people in this thread. People who don't understand what it's like to be systemically pushed down into the mud; what it's like when all of your choices are either bad or worse.
"But you can recycle..." Shut the fuck up dude, recycling doesn't feed my fucking family. Recycling doesn't replace the years spent in an education system that's designed to make you a factory worker. Recycling doesn't bring living-wage-paying jobs to my hometown.
When the bills are in the mail, the tax man is coming, the landlord's raising the rent, and the bossman is driving a new car every year but can't pay you enough to keep your bank account from overdrafting, sometimes you have to do "immoral" shit.
Sometimes you have to kill an animal with no hunting license, sometimes you have to find a place to stay warm for the night, sometimes you have to feed your kids when all you have is cardboard and that might mean stealing bread from the dollar store.
I remember the millionaire who wanted to prove that he could rebuild his wealth if he started from scratch again. He cheated a little bit because he used his friend apartment for free.
Fast forward, he gave up after a couple of months and understood what the rest of us knew for ages.
Wealthy people are delusional and no amount of reasoning will work with them.
That's the problem with this entire post. Who is saying any of this? Whose morals are we talking about? If you can just as easily recycle something as throw it in the trash and you choose not to recycle because your rent is too high and your boss is a piece of shit, that's just nonsense. On the other hand, as a vegan, I personally do not have any moral objection to you illegally hunting animals for food if that's the only access to food you have. What is the point of any of this, is this some kind of vaguebooking about some other post?
Giving a shit about recycling is mentally taxing. One of the worst parts of being poor is the mental strain of uncertainty inherent in your life which makes long-term planning and delaying gratification increasingly difficult. Any ounce of willpower you have needs to be spent maintaining or improving your situation, not used up doing things that have literally no impact on your life.
This is why veganism is typically seen by poor people as an extravagant virtue signal of wealthy people. Poor people may choose to eat fewer animal products because they are expensive - but few would turn down a free well cooked steak. Caring about animal rights or the environment is something only the wealthy have the mental bandwidth to do - telling a poor person that they should do these things only serves to alienate them.
I've been pretty poor - I was just reviewing my social security statement and I made less than $15k two years in a row. I've been the overemployed kind of poor (working multiple jobs) and the underemployed kind (out of work). I've been a vegetarian throughout, and I've always managed to put my recycling into a bin.
I also have ADHD, and there are times when I get overwhelmed and do have to compromise my morals on something like throwing stuff away instead of donating to get through a move when I don't have the bandwidth.
But those are stories about me, not generalizations about everyone who is poor or everyone with ADHD. If you want to talk about your own struggles, that's great, we'll listen. But you don't get to generalize about everyone else you have decided must be just like you. Being poor sucks, but if you are bound and determined to wallow and to bring everyone else down with you, that's on you. These generalizations are not making some kind of classist point you think they are.
Who said anything about not recycling for those reasons? I said that recycling isn't going to solve all of the problems that poor people face.
Nice cliche veganism toss-in though.
That's literally how your post reads. Maybe you should save up for English classes.
It's "literally" not. You're "literally" interpreting it that way. Maybe you should've actually paid attention to the ones your parents paid for.
Touché
Thank you for seeing clearly.
At any rate, what I was trying to say was that recycling doesn't solve every problem poor people face. I didn't say "Don't recycle if you're poor because it does nothing."
This is true and I am saying that as someone who is well off, the movie parasite talks about this great. Its easy to be a nice person when your rich
If you worked a little harder, you'd have a lot more...
Well this is getting added to my playlist.
Dude looks like Tyler Cassidy's nephew or something.
warning satire
Are you sure your not just being lazy? Maybe it was the choices you made that landed you there. It's not like there is a whole system in place to oppress a certain class of people.The blame and the shame is on you for being so damn poor
I cannot believe that you're being downvoted. This place disappoints me.
A preemptive warning of satire kinda breaks the entire thing and makes it fairly lame
See, I agree with you, but I've also been virtually beheaded because of stupid people who don't understand what I believe to be very clear satire. So it's lose-lose.
I was told I'm a politician in another thread so... yeah I don't know man.
K.
Looks like the consensus finally turned around somewhat
So you listed a bunch of things that make sense for illegal things you might have to do in order to acquire food but just because you are poor why can’t you recycle?
Poor people are excellent recyclers. Even in states that don't offer bottle exchange they will collect for the aluminum/other alloys, alone.
And that makes logical sense to me that’s why I was surprised by the other commenter
That's not the point.
The point is that doing little things like reducing reusing and recycling are not the end-all be-all solution to being broke. I'm saying that doing moral things doesn't automatically give you a liveable life; it doesn't magically make everything ok.
But especially reusing things should be a priority if you are broke right? Like that’s a way of saving money
WHERE DID I SAY IT WASN'T?
God damn, I am sick of you misinterpreting mother fuckers.