this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
234 points (97.2% liked)
Showerthoughts
41553 readers
841 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
Why do you assume these all need to be new careers? Why do you assume that we can't expand existing careers? It's happened in the past, it can happen again. Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.
There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford. Really any industry that involves a lot of human labor. People want more education than they can afford. People want more healthcare than they can afford. People want more childcare, private tutoring, home cleaning, personal trainers, life coaches, financial advisors, and on and on. Think of the retinue of assistants and employees the wealthy employ. Now imagine the number of people who can afford those services drastically expanding. We don't even need to necessarily invent new careers. There's plenty of latent demand already. Those masses of displaced agricultural workers? Most of them found jobs in fields that already existed.
This is false. I'll ignore the employment rate and focus on labor force participation rate, as unemployment doesn't count people who are long-term unemployed and have given up working. Labor force participation is a better metric here.
Labor force participation has gone up and down, corresponding with changes in demographics. Despite generations of technological change and automation, we've always found ways to employ the excess labor. Human labor is always the ultimate bottleneck. There's probably enough latent demand for human labor to employ many multiples of our current population.