Shower Thoughts That Keep Me Up At Night

Morning people run. Society, we march to the rhythm of their drumbeat, and yet, on average, they are less intelligent than the night owls. They are, however, more likely to be happy, so let's call it a draw.

A person who coined the term "living room" must have thought all the other rooms in the house were lifeless and dull. An ad tech company that tracks your identity across the internet knows more about you than most of your loved ones. Are tattoos just graffiti for your skin? And is graffiti just doodling with less restraint?

TV, social media, and web publishers depend on ad revenue to operate. Advertisers need a captive audience for their ads. As viewers, we see what we want to see and are mingled with what we don't want to see. It's an odd mix that finances most of our media, but hey, even oatmeal cookies have raisins. Ads don't work very well; they're easy to ignore, and most people just find them annoying. Yet, advertising is responsible for many cultural staples. For example, we associate diamonds with marriage proposals because De Beers launched some very persuasive ad campaigns in the 1930s. Thanks to one diamond company, anyone looking to get married will feel pressured to spend thousands of dollars on a small shiny object with no real utility.

Speaking of marriage, weddings can be extravagant over-the-top celebrations for two people to live more mundane lives than they lived before. Marriage is a nice commitment in all, but it's mostly just a set of legal obligations and privileges that you're only entitled to if you participate in monogamy. That's not very rock and roll.

Driving a car is like being on a roller coaster where everyone can steer their individual cart. Prisons are the places where we can find people for a specified period of time and punish them if they don't obey the rules. Schools are places where we can find children for a specified period of time and punish them for not following the rules. Are schools prisons with an educational bent, or are prisons schools without the learning?

The universe having a beginning makes it hard to comprehend; the universe always having existed is similarly hard to fathom. Libraries are just video rental stores with an altruistic mindset. You can rent video games at most American libraries now. This is less of a shower thought and more of a PSA.

To paraphrase Heraclitus, you can never walk in the same river twice, but we can still walk into some of the same water molecules that Heraclitus did when he said that. Good luck finding them, of course. Why is it that you can nap in a chair in full sun during the day, but at night you need complete darkness in the most comfortable horizontal surface to stay asleep?

The only time you know what your house smells like is when you return from a long absence. When you own a home, you're really just renting space with more perks and responsibilities. When you rent a home, you're renting from someone who is also just renting. Shelter is one of our most basic needs, yet it's increasingly out of reach for people who don't already own property. Food is yet another basic need that is getting more and more difficult to afford. Has anyone checked in on water and air lately? Because I'm getting a bad feeling.

Businesses will often refer to their employees as family, except if you think about it, it's a family where people periodically disappear, and you're not supposed to talk about them anymore, which sounds like a horror film. Imagine being in a real family unit where you were paid to be there, which I kind of guess is what an allowance is.

People often suggest that an only child is a lonely life for that kid, but I like to think of it as a life where you don't grow up with enemies living in the same household fighting for your parents' love. If you were God, would you create humanity? And if so, why? Would it be for the affection of your creation, or would you just be bored with nothing interesting to watch? Or a third option: you get joy from watching tiny beings suffer.

When someone asks if something is worth that amount, the most accurate answer is no. We just have an arbitrary system that applies values based on certain factors such as scarcity. When the world dies, your shiny Charizard won't fetch a penny. Are all relationships transactional? Do we just give love to get love? That would make love conditional, but when you get married, you often swear to love someone unconditionally, which could potentially violate the transaction, leaving you with a bad deal.

When I die, everyone I know will be nothing to me, and when they die, I'll be nothing to them. But if you manage to cherish the time you have together, you'll still ultimately be separated by oblivion. So is our attachment to others a curse? If I care what people say, it makes me nervous and vulnerable. If I don't care, the reward for my positive interactions is diminished.

The further we are from people, the less we tend to care about them. The opposite is true if you are in love with them. From your perspective, you are an endless set of possibilities. You could technically do anything, even though you end up doing the same thing most of the time. But when others love you, they love you for being a specific, predictable set of traits and outcomes. They love what you resist.

Your body replaces every one of your cells over the course of seven years, so if you marry someone and stay together for 50 years, that's like being married to seven different people over the course of your life. So you're practically a swinger. To be successful is to rise above others, and for you to win, somebody else has to lose. Did you just land a new job? Hundreds of others just applied unsuccessfully, and you stand on the fading hopes and dreams of others.

Many of us desire to do great things, to be successful and admired. A part of that yearning is connected to our social standing. We want to impress others, to be held in higher esteem, but success often separates you from the people you want to impress. You become too busy for them or lose your ability to relate. They potentially become bitter toward you or even resentful.

All are created equal; many of us believe this. But the thing is that we often interact with people we instinctively feel are below us, like a junior coworker, for example. They are less skilled and more naive than you, given their rookie status. We can't help but buy into differences of status, and even though you may work together for a long time and their skills grow, you probably won't ever shake your initial perception of them as below you.

Your boss wants you to be ambitious, but not so ambitious that you replace them. Some become so suspicious that you probably should just try to take their job. It can be hard to find work. Did you know that as much as 85% of jobs are filled based on meritocracy? Sorry, I misspoke; I meant networking. It's who you know.

When athletes leave a team for more money elsewhere, they often cite the need to look after their families. Often, they were already making tens of millions of dollars. The family will be fine regardless. On the subject of athletes, let's consider how hard it is to go pro and what it must feel like to land that gig. But for all the glory that it can come with, athletes peak very early in life. Imagine retiring from your dream job at the age of 27, like your average NFL player. What do you do with the rest of your life?

Speaking of early retirement, did you know that esports players retire at an even younger age? By their mid-20s, these e-athletes hang up their keyboards or controllers, and you might assume it's because of fading reflexes and dexterity, but it's usually about career anxiety. The industry doesn't provide the same financial comfort as physical sports.

They say that if you land a job you love, you'll never have to work a day in your life. The issue here is that the things you love doing get tiresome after a while and just end up feeling more like work. Soon you will run out of things you love, and it will all feel like work.

The uber-wealthy often obsess about their legacy when they're bored with earning loads of money, but their legacy usually just becomes "rich person with name on building." Gamification has become a big part of our daily lives; it's used for exercise, sleep, and even education. But that's the easy stuff. We should also gamify our work because it's often a real slog. Imagine tiny reward systems for finishing emails that give us a score of quality and timeliness. It would probably help a lot of us get through the day and feel satisfied.

Of course, your bosses would probably use this against you, and then suddenly your performance is being held over your head at every turn. It kind of sounds like I just accidentally created a dystopia, or at least an episode of Black Mirror. But still, if companies are going to be increasingly spying on your every move, at least make it a game.

Speaking of gamification, a problem with the implementation is that it only works for brief periods. Have you ever played a game longer than a few months? Okay, sure, like a lot of people are still playing Fortnite, but it's practically added several completely different game modes to stay relevant. Despite our best efforts, we often inspire the opposite of what we intended. We commit an act of irony.

A good example is when a doctor invented a product intended to replace morphine; it ended up being sold as a sugary drink that has caused health problems for over a century. A fair number of avid cola drinkers probably needed morphine as a result of deteriorating health. Inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. designed a contraption to help him get out of bed and into his wheelchair after suffering from polio for several years. He ended up getting caught in it and died from strangulation in 1944. The same man was famous for adding lead to gasoline and using CFCs for refrigeration, claiming that they were both completely safe. Who knows the kind of harm he would have caused if he lived longer?

To become more confident in a subject, we try to learn more about it, but the more we learn, the less confident we are in speaking about it. It's common to tell people what to do to get them to behave in a way we desire. However, this has the common effect of inspiring the opposite. It's called psychological reactance. What happens is that we feel a threat to our freedom and react with anger and often rebel. As a result, people are less likely to respond this way if they are told they're free to choose what they feel is best for them or if they can empathize with the person telling them what to do.

Social media has exacerbated psychological reactance by a large magnitude, often for the sake of a cause. Ex-users especially demand people behave in a certain way. An obvious example is when vaccines were rolling out in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the platform was still known as Twitter. Well-intended people online shouted from the rooftops that everybody should get vaccinated, and a large group of people reacted poorly and are still reacting poorly today. They effectively turned their psychological reactance to vaccine mandates into a movement.

We designed technology to make our lives easier, but most new tech has resulted in us working longer hours. When we go home, we're never really off the clock. Some employees working remotely are even tracked on their computers. Whatever happened to those visions of the future where we relax as machines do all the work? Our lives aren't any better because we actually designed technology to make money. If it helps people, that's a nice and rare side effect.

When technology actually saves us time, our work hours aren't reduced; it just means that what is expected of us goes up. When the vacuum, electric stove, and dishwasher were invented, it didn't reduce the amount of labor involved; it just elevated the standard of what a good home looks like. Artificial intelligence gurus talk about AI giving us shorter work weeks and a better work-life balance, while business leaders discuss how much more you'll get from your average employee.

In the business world, people use data to justify actions; then they find more ways to generate data to justify more actions, and this process is expensive and in most cases doesn't beat just going with your gut. Social media platforms are technologically induced hell; they're designed to keep users on a platform for as long as possible, and by almost any means, they create an addictive flow that keeps you scrolling, whether for envy or outrage.

As a result, our lives outside the algorithm are less interesting, while our lives within are miserable. TV streaming services disrupted cable television with no ads and inexpensive monthly subscriptions; now they have ad options, and one combined can cost a similar amount to cable, so we're right back where we started. Speaking of TV, younger generations aren't watching a whole lot of it. According to a 2021 study, people between the ages of 16 and 24 watch seven times less TV than people over 65. Their media time has gone to social media and short-form streaming content, like this channel. Thank you, by the way.

But what kind of effect does short-form content have on young minds? It apparently makes you bored more easily and increasingly prone to procrastination. Don't look at me; these videos are usually over ten minutes long. Are you interested in procrastinating less? Mindfulness meditation can help you become less distracted. After every five TikToks, try focusing on your breath for six minutes to regain the focus you just lost.

If the internet becomes mostly non-human generated, is it no longer fit for humans? Will we leave our digital lives behind to know for sure that we're talking to real people? Maybe. But why does that sound like an excellent outcome? Has anyone ever wanted to receive notifications from a website? Because I can't think of a circumstance where anybody really wants that.

Do you ever wonder if everyone else in the world thinks completely differently? The thoughts are neatly organized and plucked from a shelf, and that it's just your mind that feels like a mess and everybody else is just humoring you. Stopping a shower is as close as it gets to turning off the tap for pleasure. It's a miracle that we ever escape.

I think we all occasionally have dark thoughts that we would never share with anyone in a million years. Now imagine everyone you know having similar thoughts, and you couldn't help but overhear them. This is kind of a prime example that ignorance is bliss. There's a new theory that suggests the universe has a twin that runs backward in time as our universe moves forward. Just think about your life in reverse for a second; that's all I'm asking.

New evidence supports the idea that our lives actually flash before our eyes when we die. Electrical activity in the brain continues even after our lungs stop pumping oxygen. The part of the brain that stores memory and the area that is responsible for consciousness is far more active than normal in this state, and this finding supports what people describe when they have a near-death experience.

How do you feel when you think about your own life flashing before your eyes? Are you worried that you won't have had enough great experiences to reflect on? Do you dread the idea of revisiting some of the harder times in your life? In a way, this thought experiment is like Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence. He suggested that the ultimate affirmation of life is to will it into the future, and to do that, you have to imagine living it the exact same way over and over and over again.

It's not only a way to affirm the past but to live your life going forward in a way that's easier to embrace. See your remaining days if the past and future don't exist and all we have is the present. Then we don't have any real reason to worry. Go too far with this thinking, and you lose object permanence.

Have you ever stood upon a precipice, like a cliff edge, and worried you were going to throw yourself off? The good news is that it's likely just a form of anxiety and that you won't actually do it. But then again, you are free to do so, so maybe take a few steps back because you really only do have one life after all. Or do you?

There have been thousands of reports of children claiming to recall their past lives. They can remember specific details of the previous incarnation, which are then verified by the family members of the deceased. If these accounts are true, does that mean that consciousness can leap from the dead to a newborn? And does that then entail that our consciousness has always existed?

With the prospect of reincarnation, we are still left with more questions than answers. If the experience of rebirth is real, that means your child could be the continuation of some cranky elder who used to scold you for stepping on their lawn. Think about that as you tuck your child in. Imagine whispering sweet dreams to them and then hearing ever so slightly, "Get out of my garden!"

When somebody dies, it's normal to suggest that they did the best they could in life, but this really isn't true for everyone who has ever existed. Even history's most notable individuals could have found better ways to work smarter, not harder, as they say in the business world. Roller coasters are very safe, and they're designed to make you feel fear. Cars are comparatively not safe, and are designed to make you feel at ease.

In North America, we've reduced the number of people smoking to less than 12% of the total population, and yet tobacco companies make greater profits. How is this possible? Well, it's pretty simple, actually. Every time the government raises the taxes on cigarettes, tobacco companies add their own price increase, and the result is a wide profit margin that more than makes up for fewer people smoking.

When we are romantically involved with someone, we often kiss them on the lips. Why do we do this? Less than half of all creatures around the world kiss on the lips. They have other ways of showing intimacy, such as sniffing each other or nibbling eyelashes. But if you're still interested in kissing, did you know that when you kiss with tongues for ten seconds, you're sharing over 80 million bacteria? And if you kiss at least nine times a day, you will have a very similar saliva microbiota to your romantic partner. Hope you have enough breaks during the day for your kissing habit!

Speaking of intimacy, did you know that hugging can boost your immune system and prevent illness? A hug a day keeps the doctor away... unless that's who you're hugging. But honestly, you don't need anyone, provided you're not concerned about your health. Loneliness and isolation come with an increased risk of premature death. It can have a significant detrimental effect on your physical and mental health.

In general, thinking of skipping town to live off the land in the wilderness? Consider your health. We spend a lot of time masking our body's odor. We use deodorant, antiperspirant, cologne, and perfume. We scrub ourselves with soap, leaving a lavender scent. We pay careful attention to this process when we go on dates, and yet, as it turns out, studies show we are attracted to body odor. Sorry, everybody; you've just really been wasting your time.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, unless you didn't say you were leaving or if you die of a broken heart. While we're on the subject, can you actually die from a broken heart? In rare cases, yes, you can die from broken heart syndrome. It's often brought on by stressful situations or extreme emotions, like when you left me.

When we get our heart broken, we often resolve to choose better. Some people even make a list of qualities they are looking for in another person. However, rational decision-making is easily overridden by the powers of lust and attraction. The hormones and dopamine involved even shut off the prefrontal cortex of your brain, where rational thinking takes place.

In choosing a good partner, you're probably the biggest obstacle. Clutch the list once tightly as you go on dates searching for sensible love. While being in a relationship with somebody may seem like the most intimate experience you can have, it takes a backseat to donating an organ. You just took a literal part of yourself and had it put in somebody else. And if all goes well, it'll last there for years.

Do you think if somebody dies shortly after they receive your kidney or chunk of your liver, you could get your organ back? Like, you know, if somebody else didn't need it? Or is it like taking a gift back? And if that is the case, then wouldn't the organ recipient giving the organ to somebody else be considered regifting, even if it belonged to you in the first place?

You have a value – and I'm not referring to an emotional value, a monetary one – but it'll probably only come up when you're dead. I guess you'll never really truly know your worth unless you fake your death. About a third of songbird species only have one bird call. Imagine only getting to say one thing for the rest of your life. What would it be?

Birds are dinosaurs, by the way. It's very unlikely that any other lineage of animal would have evolved to host feathers. They had to come from one source. Dinos give birds the respect they deserve. It's funny that we say we're climbing stairs when they're an invention to prevent the need for climbing. We don't say we're falling downstairs, on the other hand, unless we trip, and we usually wait until after the fact and then say we fell down some stairs.

When you stain a deck, it's a good thing. When you stain your pants, it's bad. And when you're stained on the fabric of society, that's even worse. I grew up with people who learned karate and even received a black belt, but I've never seen these skills used or heard of them being applied in a time of need. I guess it must be true that you learn karate so you don't have to use it.

When someone dies, we often say they moved on or passed away. These expressions have spiritual implications. If you are speaking with someone who doesn't believe in an afterlife, you could say something like they ceased, or they ended, or maybe just play it safe and go with passed away.

I haven't exactly workshopped these responses. On the subject of the afterlife, though, do you know how the Ouija board got its name? It was spelled out on the board, which had no name at the time. It kind of sounds like a word you would make up in Scrabble. But do you know how the Ouija board became so successful? Spiritualist camps in Ohio started using the board to channel spirits, and some shrewd businessmen picked up on the popular trend. They branded the board in the late 1900s and successfully marketed the mystery of it to your average consumer. None of the businesses were spiritualists in any way.

Dogs occasionally sit by their owner's grave, even though their master is gone for good. Are they loyal, or are they just waiting for their next meal? It's also worth mentioning that dogs and cats have been known to eat their owners after they die, so there's also that to consider.

Your hair going gray is a lot like a marker running out of ink, except ideally nobody will throw you away afterwards. You also never really get to see the back of your own head without the aid of something, and we all know how mirrors and photographs can lie right to your face.

Okay, this is a sad one, but when you're in the presence of the dead and you start crying, it looks like they're still breathing. Okay, shake it off with something stupid. It's theorized that all life on Earth started with one single ancestor. We're all very, very distant cousins, including the Charo vipix, a gliding reptile with wings on its back legs.

It's very disturbing, given that we all share a common ancestry. Doesn't it seem a bit odd that we often try to injure one another? Perhaps we should embrace an attitude of loving all things without qualification. Except the Charovipx. If that thing were still around, I'd take it down with the first rock I could find. Would you think butterflies were beautiful if they didn't have wings?

Roses don't often like to be identified as bros, yet they say their names like Pokémon. This concludes my extensive list of shower thoughts that keep me up at night. I honestly thought coffee gave me my recent bout of brain fog, but after finishing this video, I'm pretty sure it's all the sleep I've been losing thinking about how alone we all are, or how we never truly have any alone time, with our subconscious throwing terrifying thoughts at us. Thoughts that find us in the darkest of nights or the hottest of showers.