this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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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 weird that we enjoy stimulating our fear response (lemmy.ca)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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What would aliens think if they leaned we evolved fear as a survival mechanism, but we intentionally seek out situations that trigger our fear response, for fun?

Horror movies, extreme sports, thrill-seeking, it's all weird.

Edit
Changed the title and added an extra line to make it clear I'm talking about the fear response, and not specifically about extreme sports

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[โ€“] 0ops@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean, yeah fear is a big part of extreme sports, but it isn't the attraction. You never heard Tony hawk say "hey, watch how scared I get when I attempt this trick". That's not the point. It's about the satisfaction of improving motor skills and the ability to move in new and interesting ways. But mostly it's just fun. Really it's not so different from skill-based video games, it's just that in real life you have to work your way up to the more advanced stuff to do it safely.

[โ€“] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 months ago

Maybe I'll edit my post because you're not the first person who misunderstood. I'm specifically talking about thrill seeking, not extreme sports specifically. I couldn't fit the whole premise in the title so I just picked an example ๐Ÿ˜ญ