this post was submitted on 29 Sep 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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Are you familiar with 'jouissance'?
The drive continues past satisfaction into compulsion.
Pleasure is mixed with pain, shame, or guilt during/after the act.
It’s symbolic. Eating can act like a shortcut for dealing with other feelings or wants — it fills a need that words or thinking don’t fix.
I wasn't familiar with the term (never studied Lacan) but I am offended by the concept of excess pleasure. No such thing.
I see enjoyment (jouissance) as a built-in surplus that pushes past satisfaction into something often painful or compulsive. Ideology hides this excess by promising straightforward fulfillment, but that promise produces the very leftover enjoyment it denies. The subject thinks it wants a clear goal, while an unconscious drive seeks the surplus; culture can redirect this surplus (sublimation) or it returns as symptoms (addiction, shame). So enjoyment isn’t just pleasure — it’s the extra push that both sustains desire and disrupts meaning.
You saying no such thing is a misunderstanding. Žižek links this surplus to the paradox that prohibiting pleasure produces a new form of enjoyment — the pleasure of prohibition. The ban sets up a forbidden object that becomes more desirable; the surplus (jouissance) then migrates into transgression or guilt, so prohibition itself generates the very enjoyment it aims to stop.
I'm curious to know specifically how this was experienced as offending