this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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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
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.
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Moral obligation. Yes I am in that constant cycle of setting boundaries, having them crossed, and forgiving them because they have noone else to care for them. I don't see giving up as an option on the matter but I know I'm sacrificing my mental health for them.
I'm dealing with a situation at the moment where an individual was a caregiver for decades, only for the cared person to turn around and leave the caregiver to die when the caregiver became too old to provide the care the cared person felt entitled to have.
They will never show you any gratitude, and it will be genuinely dangerous when you decide to stop or simply can no longer continue providing care.
Once you exist in the psychopath's world, you only have one of two choices: be useful or be destroyed. People without any utility to them don't exist to them, however, once you exist, you can't go back to not existing.
Take care, and acknowledge the opportunity cost of your time and energy is being deprived from other people who genuinely need and can appreciate it.
That's the answer I expected but I hoped for some kind of miracle tactic. I know you're right and it's something I need to consider the pros and cons of. I appreciate your advice
Is there any reason why you downvoted my other comments?
You can learn a lot of valuable skills by being a caregiver to someone like this, although they will try to pull you into their cynical worldview. This is a simplistic, and distorted view of the world that aligns with how psychopaths and narcissists experience the world, however, isn't useful nor realistic.
They both have a splitting mechanism where people are split into an all good and an all bad object, and struggle to integrate these two objects into an integrated object that accurately represents people. The psychopath can't create complete objects, and so splits people into good in the form of utility, and bad in the form of impediment to their goals.
Cynicism is assuming the true object is the bad object because they feel it's safer to assume the worst in someone than assume the best. Game theory suggests this makes sense in extremely hostile environments, however, is detrimental in most other situations. It has a tendency to create the hostile environments it's supposedly adapted to cope with.
I downvoted your comments? I upvoted your comments. I don't disagree with anything you've said