this post was submitted on 22 Oct 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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I've just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)

Man, this isn't a world I want to live in. I'm so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s โ€“ there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.

Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I'm only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser's game...

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[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Shit, forget phones and AI, let's go even more basic. Your brain still has essentially the same neocortex that people around 250,000 years ago had, and it is evolved to only be capable of processing/understanding a maximum of around 150 interconnected social relationships, the number of people that a hunter-gatherer 250,000 years ago could expect to know and interact with over their lifetime.

We haven't had time to adjust to meeting and knowing more than about 150 people total in your lifetime. How many contacts are in your phone right now? I had like 500 facebook friends as a teenager and they were all people I knew outside of social media... Our current lives are extremely different than the life that our brain is equipped for.