this post was submitted on 07 May 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
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With modern advertising techniques, adverts mainly work by psychological manipulation - putting a name in your mind, making you associate it with an emotion (for example cars are "freedom", perfume is "lust"), induce fear of a non-existing problem and then sell you a "solution" and so on.
It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all.
That's how it is every day in every place (even the comfort of your own home) in the advert heavy world we live in if one doesn't fight to keep that shit away.
Also, "problems" that are things capitalism created for itself, and then sells you a solution. Such as services that scrub old subscriptions that you don't use, or companies that get you out of timeshares.
"It's like being the focus of a crowd of untiring salesmen who are slick manipulators with training in Psychology and with no ethics at all."
It's not LIKE that. It IS that. It's literally exactly that.
Actually I think it's worse: human salesmen cost money whilst this shit is mainly automated or uses distribution systems were one person presses a button and millions get exposed to it (for example TV), so the numbers involved and the relentlessness of the pestering is far, far larger in scale than if human salesmen were doing it.
I liken it to humanity devoting almost a third of our planetary output on perfecting the poison that will reduce everyone but the creator to useless, incompetent, stooges. This is obviously an incredible net good for the species as a whole. We should never stop this.
Advertising hasn't been that psychological since cable TV. These days, almost no work is put into advertising creatives. The goal is simply to spam and inundate you with messaging so the product is in your mind at all times. People have incredibly short attention spans thanks to smart phones so advertisements need to be virtually instantaneous in delivering their message.
Its really all about statistics these days. Very little thought or effort is put into advertisements.
Have a look at Perfume adverts on TV: they are literally entirely made up of imagery meant to make one think about sex and being sexy, with not a single thing in any of them about the actual quality of the product.
Car adverts too are similar, but their imagery is about things like Freedom, Family, Friendship, Party, Joy and so on (depending on the car). Almost none of them talks about the qualities of the actual vehicle.
Adverts not relying in this kind of psychological manipulation are the ones which look a lot like 1950s adverts and talk about the actual qualities of the product.
Under-investment into training advertising creatieves doesn't mean that the adverts aren't using Psychology tricks anymore because that way of doing adverts is now so widespread and common in the industry (because it works!) that people just learn those things as tricks of the trade rather than needing any kind of special extra training in Psychology.
You're talking Cable TV? I don't have cable so I can't see it but Cable is going the way of the dinosaur
Any live TV - were I live they all show the same ads.