If you want to dive into that sort of thing i recomend looking into social constructivist theory, nuts to realise just how much of everything we live our lives by is really a product of people agreeing to do so rather than any struct objective measure.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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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: 1
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Money and time are two big ones. They both mean so much to humans but we're the only ones that have ascribed that value to them.
Exactly, like crypto for example, it has no real world value (in fact it has negative real world value) and the only thing that makes it valuable is that enough people believe it has value.
I did not! Do not drag me into this entire mess.
The only reason the sequence of symbols you wrote say what you wanted to say is because we all agree on what it says.
You could honestly say this about most of reality.
So how about we all agree it’s Saturday.
You have my sword.
And my bow
Pfff nah, it's because yesterday was Tuesday obviously
I disagree. Today is saturday.
Imagine if Europe decided there was 6 week days and America decided there was 7
Shortly after the revolution the French attempted a 10-day calendar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Ten_days_of_the_week
No, it's goddamn Tuesday now.
Hmm.. Thursday for me. Are we on the same planet?
Depends on how we're framing it. We agreed on names of days and lengths of weeks based on our culture and tradition, but that's not really what today "is", though. What it "is" is the 171st rotation in the current revolution around the sun. No need to agree on anything there. That just is what it is.
Where the rotations started (new years for example) is also of course arbitrary, as is the starting point for each rotation ("midnight")
Or the starting point in general. Maybe we've been running 15 minutes late for everything, since forever.
The only reason you're talking, is that we all agree what each word means.
It is neat seeing our agreement on these words change over time. And seeing a few people complaining about words not being used in its original meaning, thinking language is static. And cursewords going from taboo to common usage.
Did you know shark (most likely) comes from the dutch word schurk (meaning bad guy/villain/scoundrel)? Which is where Loan Shark comes from, not from the fish. And the fish was called Haye or Dogfish? At some point the english speaking people decided that the fish should be called "bad guys". Meanwhile, here in Norway we kept both the words "skurk" and "hai" from the dutch, in its original meaning.
I wish I found this so fascinating back when I was still in school and could have taken that path.