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:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
To play devil's advocate; being on your phone is an isolating activity, while watching the TV is generally more communal, and was especially so in the era in which Boomers have spent most of their life.
Millenials and most Gen Z have shows that everyone watched growing up, but that's going away increasingly, with on-demand streaming and customized feeds replacing the latter. I think it's a very obvious culprit of why young people today struggle to talk to one another.
I am Gen Z.
Honestly, I've kinda grown to hate these phones, yet I find myself constantly going back like it's a digital addiction. Compared to entertainment media prior to these horror pocketbricks, seemingly everything had more novelty. TV/Movie nights were special and shared with family, and man it was always fun picking out what CD to pop into the player. Gaming sessions were entertaining because my brother would join, and we'd have a couch party with a GameCube, or even a Nintendo DS with a multiplayer game. He was such a screenpeeker.
It plagues me that the more I think on it, I truly dont feel it's nostalgia, there seems to be a lost novelty, and the phone and internet largely seemed to replace it all. Now, couch parties are had as a Discord call, movie nights are supplemented with a customized YouTube feed. Even the era of personal websites are fading away.
On a side note, all those things are possible for us to have today, yet we don't. It feels like a conscious decision to pursue convenience over connection, but why did we pick this path?
This. For better or worse people would gather to watch a show at a particular time and day. It often turned into much more of a social event than a let’s watch this show event. A thirty minute show was a several hour gathering of people. Laughing, eating, having a good time.
You cannot replicate that using a phone.
Older people can be just as bad as young ones about phone addiction and poor habits let alone manners
I was on vacation with my girlfriend and we met up with her parents abd went to dinner with some of their friends. All in their late 60es early 70es. Me and my girlfriend are around 40 and the kids 5 to 8. The children aren't really alliwed on their phones and i thought it was rather rude to hang on my phone. Then i saw these elderly people either playimg candy crush or something similar or asking their phone 20 timea in a row how long the coastline in italy was, or similar questions. It was way too loud for chatgpt or Gemini or whatever to pick anything up, so they just kept asking. It was quite bizzare to me, because 30 years ago, i would've been the kid on a gameboy and people their age would tell me that it's bad and rude.
Parents and grandparents are more isolated than they ever been, and have lost social skills along with the rest of societies where phones own the users rather than the other way around. People are lonely everywhere and old folks struggle with this in many industrialized societies. No one is around to tell the older folks how they look, that it's strange and uncomfortable, and many don't have grandchildren now to help them see what else is out there in life. Young people need older folks around and both groups benefit as do parental-age people from this historic arrangement. It's fucking tragic, like watching the death of a species...and that's before you bring the environment into it.
My mother was constantly on her phone playing games or scrolling social media/TikTok/YouTube. Even when her favorite shows were on she barely paid any attention.
My mom used to knit during shows, and either miss a plot point, or lose count of a stitch and have to unravel stuff.
For movies, she was notorious for falling asleep and getting upset that we finished watching it anyway.
Lol my grandma had phone additiction long before smart phones. Watching TV before steaming really sucked with her in room.
I'm GenX and I honestly can't stand to watch ads anymore, they're all so stupid and I feel like I've put in my damn time already with the ads. I suppose that's why most ads are aimed at younger people until they want to start selling you catheters.
millennial here, I absolutely hate ads with such a passion that I will go very far out of my way to block ads. I've side loaded a YouTube alternative onto my TV to avoid ads. My parents (boomers) have no problem paying for xm radio and still being advertised to!
Yeah same here, my Mom will actually DVR stuff and not skip through the ads lol. WTF.
DVRs still exist?
Yes but it’s really only boomers who still have cable and use them.
Plex and Jellyfin are DVRs. They just do other things too.
I realize that i always hated ads with a passion. It has probably a lot to do with autism, but i learned early on to cut out ads on whs tapes that i recorded, even tho, the ads back there was nothing like the nightmare we live in now. When i see an ad on youtube, that's what i do for however long it takes to get rid of them. Same with windows. So you want me to force to look at this? How about i learn Linux instead? At this point i don't really even know what ads are or look like, but every now and then I'm in someone's home and the tv is on and i think: wow, that's crazy, i could never.
Gen Z here. I haven't seen an ad that wasn't a billboard or of my own volition for over a year. VHS ads don't really count though so take that as you will.
My cell phone has literally all notifications turned off.
Silent always. Never a pesky red dot telling me where to tap. Never a push notification reminding me that I should reconsider using something I obviously don't need.
I havent used an actual TV for regular broadcasting in about 25 years, so my experience of ads has been targeted bullshit about buying lawnmowers when I already bought one, and eat this ONE WEIRD FRUIT to half CANCER RISK.
I miss the adverts on cartoon network. Im tired of being an adult. Tell me more about that RC Car that sticks to walls. Show me the slushy maker again.
Right?! Advertise cool shit. Not corpo crap. Liberty, Applebee's, some pharmaceutical called wongfelloffwizi
My boomer parents are looking at two screens 24/7. Either TV + tablet or tablet + phone or tv + tablet
Bonus points when I call them and they don't answer because they say they didn't have their phone with them
I swear to god, same parent telling me I'd pop my eyes out for playing aoe 2 for 6 hours non stop, watches 2 screens non stop. I honestly don't even get, if you're not watching the news, why is it on? If you're playing solitaire, fine do it, it engages brain, but then why did you buy 400 hint bundle. When I wanted a better bike for my local race, it was cheating (real reason was affordability, which was valid). But then playing solitaire with hint isn't?
And then they wonder why I don't value their opinion, what did they do wrong?
Are you my sibling?!
Millennial here, I got (and sometimes still get) my fair-share of bashing for spending way too much time on the computer. Some were concerned that I will be unable to talk with other people about the series currently running on the TV (!), although early on they mourned the "football star" I was supposed to become, with my late stepmother not really giving up on that until she thought instead I could be the next Zuckerberg (TL;DR: she originally hated computers because they crashed and she also read an article on the Columbine shooting once, but changed her mind once Facebook came out).
I've just never been able to connect with people, by talking inanely about reality shows or football. Woe is me.
Not that I'm in any position to speak for an entire generation but I feel like a lot of Gen Z also can't understand why Gen Z can't put their phones down and watch TV like a normal person.
"tiktok will ruin your attention span"
Flips between channels every 20 seconds muttering about how there's nothing good on
Watch older tv and you realize how much time is dedicated in many shows to recapping what happened three minutes ago before the commercial break.
3 minute commercial break? So like TV from 60s?
Last I heard the average sitcom comes in at 16 minutes for a 30 minute block.
This isn't really a shower thought. It's more of a shower opinion.
Gen Z is gravitating towards analog. It’s the boomers who are addicted.
My first thought as well. My parents and in-laws are constantly on screens while watching TV.
I know plenty of Boomers who are additcetd to their smartphones. Even more so than the younger generations. Some even have the TV on in the background while doomscrolling.
Correction: boomscrolling 😁
😀
And I'm a (late) millennial and spend most of my time at home neither on my phone nor TV, but my laptop computer (connected to two external monitors).
I got my first own computer when I was 10 and ever since then, using the computer has been my "default" activity when I'm at home. Smartphones came after that and didn't change that, I still prefer big screens with a keyboard and mouse if I have them, mainly use my smartphone when I'm not at home.
Because TV is boring as hell most of the times and majority of it is ads which cant be blocked.
At least with phone i have to move my thumbs or put a little taught into how to express myself.
Standard TV is just a complete mind numbing existence. It's pretty much equal to just being in a coma. Even sleeping is better, at least the body is recovering at that time. Standard TV is one of the worst ways to consume data garbage.
Of course there are good movies and documentaries, but those are a minority.
Actually, boomers are some of the most phone-addicted people I come in contact with 🤷♂️
Gen-X quietly in the corner, remembering how they watched TV a lot too, but also mostly got kicked out of the house to play outside and "don't come back in until dark".
Edit to emphasize this wasn't necessarily a choice we made for ourselves. Boomers (and the Silent Gen before them) wanted their peace from the kids, so we were on our own. Good and bad points to that kind of character building.
So much TV. Mostly UHF on Saturday mornings until cable came along.
Like TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube aren't basically the same thing as TV.
Video content, sometimes live, loaded with commercials. Just like TV.
Like TikTok [... isn't] basically the same thing as TV.
Dude, what TV were you watching? Even clip shows like AFV weren't as WarioWare as TikTok is. TikTok is a nonstop whiplash of extremely short-form shit which you're incentivized to absorb emotionally but not to think about – way moreso than TV. The content is way shorter, and importantly, it's bouncing back and forth between completely different subjects every dozens of seconds or so. Even in the era where TV is mostly VoD, this doesn't hold up.
The parallels are there with YouTube if you watch it in a certain way (I'd argue saying "YouTube is the same" is wrong too because there are a trillion ways to watch it that act nothing like TV, i.e. that this comparison is a subset of YouTube), but to say "video playback with ads, therefore TV" for TikTok is the most ridiculous oversimplification of it I've ever seen.
TikTok is like TV in the way that a machine gun was like a musket. Like, kind of? Technically? If you want to strip away all nuance? Shooty thing go pew?
I've never seen someone panic when the internet went down as my 72yo mother
Boomer here (cusp between boomer & gen x): Why not both put down the phone AND turn off the TV?
I have a TV but pretty much only turn it on for local news & weather. I absolutely can't tolerate the ads and there are no good shows anyway except a few on PBS. I use a flip phone. I won't call it a 'dumb' phone because it's still android underneath and has navigation. But no internet.
Of course that doesn't stop me from sitting on my ass in front of a computer on the internet, but at least I'm not doing that 24/7 and have other things for entertainment like books, games, hobbies.
edit: not to imply I speak for other boomers. Most of them are on their smartphones all the time, getting notifications every 5 seconds like everyone else.
I think they crave shared experience, the social activity of watching together, of picking something that everyone wants to watch.
I miss it too, except I never wanted to watch what they wanted to watch. I couldn’t do it either.
Now I just miss them.
Boomers grew up in the 40s and 50s. 60s a little. Television had three channels and you watched when the broadcast was happening. That was it. There was already a long history of non-TV activities to do.
Today with phones and telecommunications everywhere, along with "I can consume whatever content I want to any time at my whim", is an entirely different landscape.
I wish the media environment was as basic as it was in the 50s.
In the worst case Boomer can’t even remember how we watch TV in the 90s which was exactly the same way but without our phone. We didn’t watch TV scotched to the screen like people like to think, there’s a reason why ads are blaring noise like a fucking bombing alarm now.