this post was submitted on 19 Feb 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: 1

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"Reality" is often thought as a paragon of neutrality, being neither good nor bad. So why is a "reality check" ALWAYS felt negatively? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago by Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Think of the relationship between "optimism", "pessimism" and "realism":
generally, those words are respectively interpreted as "focusing on the good things", "focusing on the bad things" and "ignoring (or trying to ignore) personal biases on the topic at hand".
In a way that makes sense, the universe defines our perception on things, not the other way around.

However, let's suppose you just had a reality check, at least as my terminally online ass knows the term as.
That means something happened to you, that forced you to realize something about yourself - be it your body, your psyche, your knowledge about anything. A realization so undeniable, that, despite your lizard brain's psychological self-defense mechanisms' censorship attempts, made you realize you've been wrong about something.

The reality check brings your mood down in the short term, and possibly pushes you to improve yourself (or, alternatively, to [concoct a workaround to the tyrannical laws of the universe]) in the long run, but... that's not truly neutral, is it?
It may be a "bad" feeling possibly followed by a good outcome (see: cognitive dissonance), but it is never a GOOD feeling followed by a possibly bad outcome. The latter case is a confimation bias, if anything - the opposite of a reality check.

Going back to the first paragraph: if someone says "I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist" you may conflate that person for an pessimist, but not an optimist.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 3 points 2 days ago

This is the most baffling use of hypertext I've seen since the early 90s.

Anyway, the premise is flawed. You reality check a toxic optimist ignoring the likelihood of a bad outcome more often than a toxic pessimist, but it's not always the case. Ultimately they're all biases. It is true that being a self-proclaimed "realist" is often just an excuse to misbehave under the cynical assumption that a rule is systematically ignored and can't be amended or enforced, though.