this post was submitted on 05 Sep 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:

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as many human heartbeats happened between 1970 - 2025 as in the entire medieval age (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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I've been studying a bit of human history recently and as many of you have probably heard, the worldwide population count increased sharply in the last century or so. link

the world's population was between 250 million and 500 million throughout the entire medieval age (500 AD to 1500 AD), so i assumed 330 million people on average (which it was around 1000 AD). 330 million people for a thousand years makes 330 billion human-years.

In the time period since 1970, approximately 6 billion people lived on earth on average, so that makes 55 * 6 billion = 330 billion human-years.

so, roughly speaking, as many human-years happened since 1970 than in the entire medieval history.

that might do a part in explaining why technological and societal progress has been so fast in the last couple of decades.

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[–] 11111one11111@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There are always things people want to tell to another person(s) that when spoken either thru inner dialog or outloud, will always feel like they're so easy to say or hear. The title of this post is a perfect exa.ple of what im trying to write avout in this comment.

I stared at that title for waaaaay too long in both the front page feed interface as well in this open comment section interface before my brain stopped either having a stroke or stopped lagg g g ing so fucking hard before I under stood why it was saying. I didnt really have a noticeablr problem. Im being dramatic but it definitely a blink or two to get thru reading the words individually, then right away read back thru looking for common word groupings. Then pulled phone back looked at the sentence as a whole beforeitfinallyclickedand****i****Ifeltsoooooostupid

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago

i have that a lot. i guess it's because of un-conventional sentence structure, i.e. if you consider a field of interest for the first time, there's a lot of new vocabulary and typical-word-groups to consider, and your brain pauses for a moment to absorb that new kind of thinking. that's why we take a pause for a second. i have the same phenomenon when i read research articles about new topics i've never really read before.