this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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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 best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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It's kind of sad to look back at that blind optimism that of course Reddit wasn't going to shit itself and I was definitely going to get that "!remindme in 10 years" DM and get a blast from the past.
Now all those messages will never be sent
Back when I was a teenager I had the blind optimism the future would be bright and we would keep all the positive trends we had in the early 2010s.
For my family, the 2010s were already a big downward trend. Huge global financial crisis and it's fallout felt to this day, good things going away or getting worse (just look at how Facebook, Twitter, etc became utter crap around 2012), the rapid acceleration of income and class inequality, just so, so much that was slowly going downhill got even worse :-(
It's easy to forget that so much happened in the 2010s, even early on. It wasn't long into that decade that Occupy Wallstreet reminded us that we can't beat the rich, and that there's no hope. It crashed and burned so hard, and nobody's been able to stand up to corpos the same way since.
For me, hope was lost in the late 2000s. Everything else has just been slow nails in the coffin since then :-(
Dang, I felt this one. But good things do come around either through lower expectations or better situations. That old quote always seems apt:
Honestly. Humans are so bad at seeing multi-year trends... myself included. Many essential things have been consistently going to shit over the past decade for sure. Climate change in the same vein, "It's not that different" "there were always record weather events once in a while" but if you look at a graph of objective scientific data, it's an exponential line of weather extreme after weather extreme with steadily decreasing intervals between events. But the neighbours insist that "We've had summers like this in the 70's, you youngsters haven't seen anything. Stop causing a panic!"
I was a teenager in the 90’s, so I understand about the whole blind optimism thing, and it’s something that I lost about 22 years ago.
All Reddit had to do was leave things alone and the community would keep chugging along.