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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- 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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The biggest privilege rich people have is to be extremely stupid on purpose. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When you don't have enough money, you have no choice but to be smarter and more resourceful. You have to learn, you have to look for other alternatives, be aware of where you are going, where you step when walking and, if you slip, to get up and take note of your mistakes. You can't afford to be stupid or look stupid, otherwise your life, which is already hard, will get worse.

But when you are rich? It doesn't fucking matter at all. You can make the biggest fuck up that a human being can do in his whole life; be deceived and swindled for amounts equivalent to a person's 5-year salary, over and over again; you can believe all the fakenews and pseudosciences that humanity has created; you can screw up as many times as you want... You will still be rich, you will still be opulent, you will still be able to make more mistakes.

While all of us are one accident or a serious illness away from ending up in economic ruin, the rich don't stop being rich even by dying.

Obvious? Yes, but it doesn't hurt to remember.

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I had an opposing shower thought the other day so I'm going to play devil's advocate on this one.

I think in a world of rational, good-faith actors (which I'm not arguing we live in), this is both by-design, and optimal at society scale.

Think about those things you're good at, and the things you're not so good at. I'm really good with computers, my time is most efficiently spent troubleshooting and building technology stacks. This skillset is in demand enough that I make a comfortable living doing it.

I'm comfortable enough that I have time to learn other skills when needed, but not comfortable enough to hire out all the otherwise commodity tasks I need done. A leak in the roof, a sink that needs replacing, some cat6 through the walls, leveling a floor before replacing broken tile from the 80's... You get the idea. I can do drywall and other general contractor work but I'm not great at it. It takes me longer to end up with a worse end product than a professional, and I don't enjoy doing it.

Every Saturday I spend doing drywall could, at society-scale, be much more efficiently spent building a k8s cluster or helping a scientist build software for research. Just like the guy doing my drywall should have a me on the other end of a phone when he needs a new laptop, or his mother gets malware.

When people hit "rich" the unspoken meaning is supposed to be that their time is valuable enough that society deems it more useful to spend it outside of commodity tasks. That seems like a good fundamental design... say what you will about its current real-world implementation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

That argument only works to explain and support the existence of millionaires and multimillionaires. With millions of dollars you can hire out most menial tasks easily. Especially if you're still living in a reasonable home.

It falls apart when you reach excessive levels of wealth. Your first few million buys you a lot of time to specialize, but your $101st million buys you less. Even moreso when you get to billions.

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