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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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.

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[–] NABDad@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (3 children)

My wife would tell me I'm depressed, and I'd agree about that.

However, she thought I should get meds, and I thought I should only get medicated for depression if the depression was chemical.

If you're depressed because life sucks, then you should be motivated to fix what sucks. Unfortunately, that's not how depression works.

Luckily, life started to suck slightly less.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

One aspect that I think most don't talk about enough is functional disorders.

Like way back in the day, depression was seen as a sign of weakness and a character flaw. Then we swung real hard to the opposite end and said that depression is completely outside of your control and is just a physical chemical imbalance. And while it certainly can be influenced by inherent brain chemistry, this is still not a particularly holistic understanding of it.

Many disorders, both physical and mental, can instead be thought of as functional disorders that act more like feedback loops. Think about something like tendonitis, it causes swelling, which causes more rubbing, which causes more tendonitis.... Depression amongst many other mental health issues, can function similarly. It saps your motivation which can prevent you from doing stuff or taking action, which makes you more depressed.

Anti-depressants can help you break this loop, but it's also entirely possible for anti-depressants to just 'even you out' enough that you feel no reason to break the loop or make any changes, and then you just end up stuck in the same loop, and just kind of end up numb to everything as a best case scenario.

The research on the long term effectiveness of anti-depressants for relatively mild - mid cases of depression is also still up for debate. A recent Australian public health report was pointing out that most studies measuring the effectiveness sof long term anti-depressant use measure the negative effects from stopping them, but many of these effects are just withdrawal, and once you control for that, they don't look more effective than therapy, but come with a slew of negative side effects.

[–] NABDad@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

In my case, having my manager quit did more for my depression than any pill could do.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I wonder about people who are depressed for "reasons" masking the depression with pills - does that make the "reasons" any better? I can see some rare circumstances where the depressive behavior was a major cause of the problem, but I'm guessing that's really rare among the population who take the pills.

Then we can ask: what would the people who sell the pills want?

[–] bcgm3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

If you're depressed because life sucks, then you should be motivated to fix what sucks. Unfortunately, that's not how depression works.

Unfortunately, that's not how life works, either. We are beset on all sides by things that suck AND which we have little-to-no power to influence.