this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
194 points (90.4% liked)
Showerthoughts
41332 readers
511 users here now
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
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- 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
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're called realists and they're everything wrong with society. We need to kill the idea of objective reality and to push everyone to choose their subjective worldview based on their own wants and needs, not society's.
Wow, that’s… not quite what I meant. The goal isn’t to reject objective reality, it’s to question how we define it and who gets to decide what counts as “real.” Pushing people to explore their own perspectives is one thing, but encouraging pure solipsism just replaces one dogma with another. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, yeah?
There is no compromising with an ideology that is inherently uncompromising in nature. It's the paradox of tolerance. Realists will never make room for experiences that defy their idea of objective reality. If they did, they wouldn't be realists. That's why in order to create room for everyone's experiences and freedom, we must destroy consensus reality. We need to kill objectivism in order to have a subjective multiverse with free exchange of ideas. Realists violate that social contract.
If objective reality doesn't exist, then your definition of 'subjective' is just a consensus-based hallucination you inherited from your own comfort. How do you know your 'multiverse' isn't just a realist's cage you haven't recognized yet? Your own argument destroys the premise upon which it rests. Also, what if my subjective experience includes what I would characterize as objective reality? You would be imposing your own definition on to me, again destroying your own premise.
Do you want to argue so that we can both learn from each other or do you want to argue so you can change My mind?
Neither. I just enjoy picking apart philosophical arguments.
Alright, well I'm happy to engage with that. I know it's not a realist's cage because I'm actively maintaining My subjective world and making choices about what to believe on a daily and weekly and yearly basis. I'm being an active agent in a way that realists don't. They let society tell them what is objectively true. I don't care about that, I'm asking Myself what is useful to believe.
How do you define what a realist cage is without being informed by objective reality?
Subjectively.
If you define this subjectively, from where comes the wording "we must" and "we need to" in your earlier messages?
Your words: "we must destroy consensus reality" "We need to kill the idea of objective reality"
In your world of free, subjective experience first, are people not allowed to form consensus that disagrees with your subjective ideals?
That's right, I'm willing to go to war and kill people over subjective differences of opinion. For example, the Nazis thought genocide is good. The allies thought it was bad. I think the allies were right to kill people over that subjective difference of opinion.
So we got right back to where we started.
I rather practice Buddhism.
Yours is the most challenging and interesting reply to this post. Of course it‘s downvoted by the intellectual nepotism babies.
Could you elaborate a bit or share links for some reading?
Not really all that interesting. It's just the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox wearing the cape of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Without the fancy jargon, the argument is "All people must be free to do whatever they want (the paradox part they don't say out loud is: except form a consensus)"
If you resolve the paradox, what you're left with is exactly the same world we have now: everyone is free to do exactly what they want, including forming a consensus (that may restrict the freedom of the individual)
It's a philosophical sleight of hand that's easy to hide in grandiose and virtuous rhetoric. I've seen it often from the Libertarian Right, and I suspect so have others on Lemmy.
I recommend you check out analytic idealism instead:
https://philarchive.org/rec/KASAIA-3
Thank you! And very interesting, from My end it's showing 4 upvotes and 4 downvotes. From your end is it showing a negative score? If so, I bet those votes come from instances we've defederated, because we don't federate with realist instances like lemmy.ml. Those people over there are really big on objective reality, and we aren't interested in arguing with them.
Anyway, sure thing! I wrote an antirealist manifesto which you can read at https://soulism.net/. But here's the elevator pitch: You're not a body, you're a mind. You're made of information, and so are your perceptions. So is the world you inhabit. Your subjective view of the world is a reconstruction, created from raw data by your brain. Babies don't know how to do that, they have no idea what's going on, they just see colours and shapes. You had to learn how to see objects, how to see a world. So what if you learned differently? What if you took the time to examine the way your perceptions are formed, and made conscious choices about how to do it? That is a thing that can be done, and the colloquial term for such is... magic. Rewriting reality through belief and perception. I would argue that we have an ethical duty to use magic to ensure we are perceiving the world in a way that is just. We need to be active agents in our subjective universe so that we can't be manipulated into doing harm.
I was wondering, if you were referring to Soulism. I first encountered it, when a Soulist instance was announced.
What you’re saying jibes well with themes I know from psychology, therapy, and occultism.
Contrary to materialist Marxist victim thinking, soulism seems to empower the individual to change.
Our current consensus reality is heavily shaped by capitalist propaganda. If we achieve a material revolution but not a magical revolution, if we overthrow Capital but don't destroy Capitalist Reality, then we're going to reproduce the conditions of capitalism. That was one of the failures of the Soviet Union. The people in charge still thought like capitalists. They still believed that human nature was in conflict with the stateless classless utopia that Marx described as the future. The USSR leadership were believers in capitalist realism, as many Stalinists are today.
Humanity is a social construct and I want to spark a revolution that sees us move beyond it. I don't think humanity is the "destiny" of our civilisation, I think we have a much greater potential for growth. I'm a transhumanist, and I think the mental is way bigger than the physical in that journey. I don't think a realist can be a transhumanist in a meaningful way. Elon Musk is not transhumanist in a meaningful way. He's very human, he's very interested in continuing the human tradition of domination and exploitation. He's a monkey that wants a bigger pile of bananas than all the other monkeys. I don't think that's the future. I think if we don't grow beyond that, then we're all going to die.
Yes, humanity needs a spiritual transformation of thought.
Marxists are materialists necessarily because it stems from a rejection of capitalism and private ownership. The vision of a classless communist society is extremely vague and put off to the far future.
Leftists often stay trapped in criticism, deconstruction, contrarianism. Anti- capitalism becomes an end unto itself. If the revolution is successful, revolution itself becomes a fetish.
lol no they aren't
Really? My perception of them has always been that they have a very strong belief in objective reality and are unwilling to entertain ideas of subjectivity. They often define themselves as materialists in a way that is less how Marx used the term and more how Dawkins would use it.