this post was submitted on 12 Mar 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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- 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
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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.
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That's the neat thing, they don't.
Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it's a well-known fact that this doesn't work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it's not worth the money.
So what are ads actually there for then?
First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone's too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.
Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.
I hate that I’m going to defend marketing here, but if they do stop marketing then things will collapse (for many businesses). Do I like marketing, personally? No. That’s why I got out of marketing and am becoming an elementary school teacher to help others rather than spit propaganda but I digress…
Marketing isn’t always about generating a sale. Many times its reach and brand recall. We’re a global and digital economy now, so reach is massively important for survival. Stopping marketing limits who is exposed to your brand and the repetition makes your company synonymous with a product.
Why do we call tissues Kleenex? Why do we call cotton swabs a Qtip? Why do we call small sticky notepads Post-Its? Why do we call searching “Googling”? Why do we gravitate toward those brands even when cheaper and more generic options exist that are perfectly on par?
Making those brands the prime thing you think of when you use a specific thing so that no one thinks of using something else even when they have money. You want people to mention your product or think about it even if they aren’t buying it.
You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.
This video by Northridgefix always stuck with me because most of why his business grew is because he spent so much Google ads that he made enough money to then move to a strip mall by a major road all while making YouTube videos and taking mailed in work.
He has another video looking for new employees because he had too much business.