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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 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
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- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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But you do understand that money makes other people grow your food, right?
I'd much rather grow my own food.
People grew food for eachother before capitalism. A book that opened my eyes to the various systems that people organized themselves under before capitalism monopolized world is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Add: “The Way We Never Were” by Stephanie Coontz.
While she deals more specifically with society in the US she also covers things like how people didn’t really have or use money in society. Money was what rich people used, the rest of everyone traded and bartered work and goods for what they needed.
People where mostly growing food for themselves and their family, not for each other. This changed when the first basic forms of capitalism where invented, things like markets, guilds, and skyrocketed with industrialization.
No other system that we tried ever worked as good and produced so much peace and prosperity like capitalism. Is it perfect? Fuck no! Nothing that involves humans could ever be. But it is the best we have from a bunch of broken and fucked up systems.
People had markets and commerce for thousands of years before capitalism.
Markets are a proto-form of capitalism. Producing something for the whole purpose to make a profit at a market is the core of capitalism.
Could you, though? Do you realize the level of knowledge, work, and risk that entailed?
Unless you've actually done it and survived without external inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, emergency food, tools.... what do you know about growing your own food?
You're living in a fantasy world.
Yes I do realize what's involved. Why would you assume everyone is as ineffective as you are? Why do you think only billionaires can solve problems when EVERY BIT OF EVIDENCE shows the exact fucking opposite?
that’s rage bait.
I'm just saying there are more ways to form a society than exclusively through the complete control and exploitation of people and the environment like we've been doing for the last 100 years.
Just because capitalism is the only way you know to live , doesn't mean it's the only way to live.
Can you describe one that is better?
Whenever we tried something else in the last 150 years it created a living hell for nearly everyone who was lucky enough to survive. And what we had before that was not paradise either, far away from it.
The problem is not capitalism but unchecked, uncontrolled capitalism.
Name one socialist or communist society that wasn't embargoed, subverted, and eventually coup'ed by the US in order to "prove" those systems don't work?
Your question is exactly the same as two of my friends holding you down while I piss in your face while asking why you like piss in your face.
Yeah I forgot that the US forced China into the culture revolution or Russland into performing Stalinist cleansings or into War communism with its huge famine.
What are you trying to say? People only grow food because of a financial incentive? We know that isnt true because agriculture is older than any monetary economic system. Money simply acts as a means of smoothing out larger trade volumes, you don't even need it for basic local trade.
Capitalism isn't even the only market system, so that doesn't really work either.
Capitalism is definitially a cancerous socioeconomic system. Prioritizing infinite growth in a finite system above all else inevitably causes systemic collapse on a long enough timeframe. Not to mention capitalism cannot hand the Matthew principle, aka power/money attracts power/money. Again, on a long enough timeframe inevitable leads to wealth disparities that collapse the system and society trying them.
The logic is plainly right there, staring us in the face that this cannot go on forever.