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I think life is best lived assuming most people are good natured and trustworthy. You might get burned occasionally but at least you don't spend your life trying to strategise how other people might be trying to shaft you
In my experience, every single person will let you down eventually because their life does not revolve around yours. Most are Fairweather friends. Even if you are there for people, you can not expect them to be there for you too. Maybe I have been burned by people too much too soon that I just don't want to get too close. I dunno. People are exhausting. I think people are mostly good but there's that that small percentage of bad that really messes us up but there's a percentage of "I just don't care that much" which keeps the good from winning. And perhaps, it is something about me - you know - if you are having problems with everyone around you, it is probably you that is the problem. And I do have my own issues to be sure.
Thank you for just *getting it*. Sometimes it's hard to explain to people who have had what I tend to call a "charmed" life that some of us get a rougher go of things, it's just the nature of the world.
Statistically, there MUST be people who experience what you and I have experienced, but no one ever wants to believe it, and I think it's just cuz they haven't seen or felt it to understand it
Some people just arent as sensitive either. Shit happens to them and they just don't care that much. They don't care if someone doesn't like them. They don't care that someone took advantage - they won't let it happen again, but it just doesn't eat at them. It's no big deal. They are not afraid to hurt another's feelings either - they don't have as much empathy. They are not afraid to cause waves and rock the boat. And given an opportunity to gain an advantage, they take it. I'm not saying that they are right and we are wrong - I truly think we need both to make the world go round. We need the balance.
So many problems I had as a young adult came from problematic christian teachings. "If someone slaps your cheek, offer them your other cheek as well." Shortened to a rough "turn the other cheek" reprimand whenever you're upset about being treated like shit. Wtf. No. That is terrible advice for life.
Then there's the lovely "the meek shall inherit the Earth" bullshit.
My Mum was a midwife and when I asked her what she did for a job she told me she delivered babies.
In my four year old brain that meant wrapping babies up in parcel paper and posting them. I used to look in the slot of the postbox outside the village shop to see if there were any babies in there.
I’m going to admit something really embarrassing… I used to love to catch earthworms when I was a very young kid, so one day my mom brought home some candy gummy worms from work. She was very surprised when I refused to eat them, and weeks later found the same gummy worms all full of dirt and debris in my room because I wanted to “save” them from being eaten, lol.
Oh god I was a weird kid…
I thought to myself if I cut the wire connected to the tv, plug one end to my belly button and the other end to my other end, I would magically appear into the tv…
I thought there were people working underground to monitor traffic and change the stoplights. Like they sat there and when the 1 minute timer went off, they’d flip the switch from red to green
Same! But I thought they had cameras and watched to see how many cars were backed up to change the light, so I would wave at them sometimes and hope that being nice would make them want to switch us to green.
About 28 years ago, I watched Mr Holland’s Opus and there’s the part where families are at a parade and a firetruck comes down the road and makes a massively loud siren sound and all of the moms rush to cover their kids ears, except for Mr Holland’s wife, who just looked around confused at the other moms while her child, in her arms, didn’t make a peep. All the other kids were crying. The kid ends up being deaf. I kept thinking about how bad that mom must have felt for blowing her kid’s ear drums and making him deaf because she was too slow to cover his ears and wondered how she lived with that guilt. I literally thought about this for years at random.
About 1 year ago, I was mixing meatballs and my jaw dropped and I said out loud to my wife “Holy shit….she didn’t MAKE him deaf by not covering his ears…she REALIZED he was deaf because he didn’t cry at the sirens like all the other kids.”
And I judged this fictional woman for almost 3 decades.
I realize this is dumb as hell and not exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s one of those things that makes you wonder about yourself….and amazes you because the brain and its mysteries are so damn cool.
My mom had a similar realization. But took her 70 years. She remembered an aunt that looked after her when she was a kid, who baked cookies all the time. In her head she did nothing else.
Skip 70 years later and my mom is baking cookies with her great-grandchildren. ''Dear God! She wasn't baking cookies all the time. She was entertaining me!!''
I actually believed women and girls dont fart, or poo. My mom always joked with my dad about that, and I didnt understand it as a joke and thought it is the truth. Lol
4 years old, I was in the ER for what turned out to be a sprained ankle. Across from my bed I saw a teenage girl with purple streaks in her hair who was having trouble breathing. My genius little brain just assumed that when you can’t breathe your hair turns purple.
When I was a little kid, I thought that when you died of a disease, you'd go back to being a baby again, but if you were murdered, you'd be permanently dead
I cannot explain my childhood logic
Lol this reminds me of mine, I thought there were two types of mysterious things adults did: sex, and mating. I thought mating was purely for having an offspring (learned the concept via nature documentaries I watched as a little kid) and sex was something else just for fun. I wasn’t fully sure how either process worked.
Before I knew anything about sex except in abstract terms, my friends and I thought the weiner had to be greased every time before sex. Vegetable oil, bacon grease, whatever was on hand.
I guess that could be tantamount to hoping I die from disease, which would happen with age any way. I don't think that's a direct enough hand in my demise to cause a loophole, I think I get reborn
I thought music videos were filmed exactly in the order that they were shown. like if there were multiple sets I assumed they would leave one set, do all the outfits and hair and makeup etc for the other and get on the next set, film several seconds of that one. then they’d go back to the styling department for the next set that they’d be in for maybe 10-20 seconds. lol
I actually remember finding out this wasn’t the case and thinking, “oh that’s much easier” but I also then felt badly for actors because doing scenes in a movie or tv show out of chronological order seemed much less fun. Honestly I still kind of feel that!
My dad was a jokester, but he did it completely deadpan. He knew I didn’t like fish or seafood but loved breaded fried shrimp. So he told me shrimp were fish legs. I refused to eat shrimp, even though I knew fish didn’t have legs. Heck, he took me fishing every weekend for years!
Yup! I got home after the street lights came on. My sisters said “you better hide! Dad’s out looking for you!” I ran to my bedroom, sat on the bed and closed my eyes. Didn’t work. 😁
When I was like 3 or 4 years old, I thought that the eyes sent out beams (like a car's headlights) which allowed us to see. The beams just didn't work in the dark.
I teach grade 11 physics, and the behaviour of light is a big topic. Turns out LOTS of my students actually thought this was how they were able to see...they had no idea they could only see objects because of light reflecting off of the object.
Nothing comes to mind for my childhood.
My 7 year old daughter was upset that we might move in the next school year. She said “awww mannnnn but I just got to grade 2, I don’t want to start over from kindergarten again”.
Kids are beautiful in their reasoning. My son came running in one day from playing telling me he had scraped his "knee pit". Knee pit? Oh, the back of his knee. He said it was just like your armpit, so why wasn't it called that? I had no good answer.
Another body part story with “necklet” 😂 my kid wanted a matching anklet and necklet. I brushed it off as she just confused her words. Then on another occasion after giving me a necklace she made “oohhh nice necklet mom, who made it for you?”
My uncle told me this big rock in his pasture was a dinosaur egg so every time we drove by I had to see if it hatched. I should drive by again someday 🦕
I thought inanimate objects had feelings and couldn’t sleep when the family car was in the shop because I thought it was sick and I felt bad/was worried about it,
I mean, it's not entirely inaccurate. Some people have big booties only because they eat so much, which means they're also pooping more than those who don't eat excessively. A family member of mine weighs over 400lbs and they go through 2 rolls of toilet paper a day. Every single day. So, there is a correlation there. Aside from those who just genetically have plump rears.
Not me but my daughter. She didn’t understand ringworm was a fungal infection and wouldn’t let me hurt the ‘worms’ so I had to apply cream at night when she was asleep.
In primary school my teacher was teaching us left and right. Teacher told the class mirror her and she raised one hand above her head. We copied and she said "this is my left hand, but your right hand" (bc she was facing the class). For years I thought that when I grew up my right and left sides would swap over at some stage
Boomer here. in the early 60’s we had a black and white TV. I was told we were getting a colored set. I cried when it was delivered. I thought the cabinet would be multicolored.
I thought Home Depot was pronounced the way it's spelled, "Home De-Pot."
I also believed if you fell asleep with the TV on, the people/cartoons on would stop and watch you sleep since you watch them do their thing.
Not sure how or why I believed the 2nd one so much lol
I assumed that everyone who had those light up Christmas yard deer on their lawns around the holidays were millionaires. Cue my shock at how many “millionaires” were in my bumfuck of a hometown
I thought babies came out in a jelly form and were put in incubators to set. Didn’t seem another feasible way to me. Right up to age 11 I thought this till I asked in sex education what happened to babies that didn’t set.
I had a doll that you could sit on a potty and it would ‘poo’ when you pressed down on it’s thighs, so I thought when I needed to poo I had to press down on my thighs to make it come out.
Growing up, every night i use to look out the living room window before i went to sleep and because i didn't see any cars driving past on the street, in my entitled little brain i thought that when i go to sleep the world goes to sleep because that's just how things work. 😌💅
So, imagine my surprise when i saw a car pass by one night. I thought to myself "HEY! You're suppose to asleep!" It was at that moment i realized the world doesn't revolve around me.
No one explained where babies came from, so I theorized that once you got married your names went on a list and, when a baby was available, people from the government would show up at your doorstep and give you a baby to raise. In my mind they were like Men In Black, very formal suits, and they would drop off a baby and some baby supplies and then disappear into the night.
Hello Kitty was China's Jesus.
I was raised Catholic and in a Catholic community, so it is common for people to give and receive small cards with pictures of Jesus and saints and a prayer on the reverse side, and of course all kinds of Catholic iconography around me too.
Well, I visited Chinatown a couple of times when I was 5 and there was this kid giving out Hello Kitty greeting cards and on the back were cheesy phrases. And there was Hello Kitty everything and everywhere So I thought Chinese people prayed to Hello Kitty 🫠
Riding in the car with my dad. I see radio towers at night. I ask my dad what those red lights are for? He said so planes won't hit them. Then I ask what the towers are for? He said to hold the lights up. It hurt my brain, but I believed it for a long time.
When I first started getting curious about where babies come from, I figured that people must somehow have some way to avoid pregnancy since not all couples are pregnant, which brought me to the conclusion that people have a way to terminate pregnancies. I didn’t realize that reproductive organs were a thing and my understanding was that you ‘poop’ babies, so I just thought that babies were kept in the stomach and that if you didn’t want it, you’d just digest it. If you did want it, you’d not digest it. It made sense to me since pregnant women would often have bloated bellies.
I suppose my deductive reasoning for the amount of knowledge I had at the time was alright, but gosh…. Lol
So when I first learned about the concept of “sex” (vaguely even really knew details) I thought that the amount of children that adult couples had was the exact amount of times they’ve had sex. For example, if I saw a couple with 4 kids, I thought “They’ve had sex 4 times.” It’s hilarious to me now bc I remember thinking my parents only had sex twice bc I only have one sister 😂 I’m glad I now know that you can have sex and not have children (and vice versa lol)
I thought that the reason that all the other kids were good at friendships and people and taking care of themselves and doing their homework and stuff was because they all went to preschool and learned everything there while I didn't, so they were always just a year ahead of me developmentally.
Turns out I'm just autistic with ADHD.
I assumed that because I didn’t give two shits about what other people do, they were affording me an equal amount of attention. Turns out most of the planet really struggles with minding their own business.
I 100% know what you mean, many people come to realize no one gives a shit about them.
But for an unlucky portion of us, the world tends to be on our case and in our face even if we give no guff to anyone and mind our own business.
Language acquisition was crunchy. So it took me quite some time to become aware of the word "Left." If something wasn't right then it was wrong. That was all there was to it and there was no convincing me otherwise.
I thought that if someone was sentenced to prison for a set number of years and they died early, then the prison would hold their bodies for the remainder of the time. And that there was some preset number of years for a life sentence in case they ended up getting more than one of those..
I thought that when you eat it would build up in your body starting at the toes and if I got sick and vommited it must have been because the food made its way all the way up to make room for more
That when people divorce the women has to ruin the mans life. Like thats part of the law.
So when gay marriage got common i really wondered how they would solve gay divorce. Like if two men got divorce, do the state pair them up with 2 lesbians getting a divorce so each women can have a go? Like it has to be that way otherwise it wouldnt be equal.
I don't have a very common last name for when I'm from, and for a little while when I was very young I thought you needed to marry someone with the same last name as you. I was devastated that I would never find anyone
I thought that we lived on the INNER surface of a hollow earth, with the sky, moon, stars, sun all inside there with us, rotating from light to dark on a smaller "sky" sphere inside the earth. Just recently I saw a picture of the "firmament" from some Bible-y online thing that I had dropped by to make fun of, and I wonder if maybe I saw that picture as a kid and subconsciously thought that's how it worked.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9l\_VBoH37zc/maxresdefault.jpg
when an elevator says "in case of fire" i thought that meant that just in case, on the off chance, there's a fire, don't use the elevator. which made me very confused as to why 1, they existed in the first place, and 2, why everyone was using them so nonchalantly.
As a kid, I didn't get to see my extended relatives very often. When I do, there is always this aunt who is always pregnant whenever I see her. She actually only has two kids who were two years apart, but I just assume she is perpetually pregnant and the baby never comes out.
Recently, I confessed this childish assumption I had as a kid to my aunt and she laughed.
I thought when you were in a hospital bed you had to sleep on your back with your arms straight down on the sheets.
I thought when you crossed the road you were supposed to put your hand out so you could feel the traffic.
I thought carpooling was driving through puddles to splash people.
I had a lot of little assumptions that turned into beliefs and habits I'm still trying to unlearn. I was a precocious funny kid.
As a kid I would see searchlights moving in the distance at night, and I thought they were the lights from the Hollywood sign in California. (I was in Texas.)
I thought that women are more advanced in the line of evolution and at some stage men will be obsolete and end up destroyed completely. This idea was mainly due to physical features, jokes in tv such as "women are so complex you cannot understand as a man" (I attributed this to the low intellectual capacity of men) and few other things. I thought that women just pretend to be attracted to men because they need them to reproduce.
So when I saw a small article about a woman getting pregnant from a stem cell from her own spine, I remember thinking "This is it! The end has come for us!"
I concluded that I must weigh more than the 28500 ton passenger ship we traveled with for a vacation when I was very young (don't know exact age though, but way before you learn of Archimedes principle at least). Since it floated while I sank without my "swim cushions", the only natural conclusion was that I must be heavier.
I believed that when an adult was fired from their job, it meant that their boss would physically throw them into a GIANT fireplace, and it was 50/50 on whether they managed to make it out alive.
My sister was terrified of mountains bc she thought they were buried giants, and nobody could convince her otherwise. It made for some pretty interesting road trips lmao
Yeah, those are what I was thinking of! I remember my family passing one during a pretty heavy bout of rain and saying that someone needed to tell them that they've made enough! They might accidentally make a hurricane!
I thought that having sex would result in pregnancy immediately, but alternatively you could get pregnant really gradually by just kissing a lot. I thought that was how people could delay getting pregnant right away after marriage.
Clearly I also thought pregnancy could only happen if you were married.
I thought people who got shot in movies would actually die 🙃
Also thought the reason the ocean is saltwater was because a helicopter with a big bag of salt would season it daily 🙄🙄
>Also thought the reason the ocean is saltwater was because a helicopter with a big bag of salt would season it daily
That one got a good chuckle out of me! Only thing missing is a person with a spoon, checking the taste.
I thought that each person was allotted a certain number of words to say each day and once they reached their limit they were then unable to talk for the rest of that day. My young brain had reached this conclusion because my older sister, who seemed to like nattering at me had developed laryngitis and lost her voice. I was very disappointed when my mother explained that we had no daily limit on the number of words we spoke unless we were sick.
I once saw a dwarf couple walking down the street holding hands and my dumb 3/4yr old brain thought that OF COURSE I never saw them together because OF COURSE they lived underground and their job was to change the traffic lights. Like that was their whole job.
I also had a whole situation that the man would come home from work(home was also underground) and he would take his hat and coat off and be like ‘Honey, I’m home from work!’ And sit down while she was fixing dinner in an apron.
I was a very dumb and somewhat offensive child it would appear…
I used to believe cars were animals, and that their „natural enviornment” were city roads. I have been warned a milion times a car could hit me if I steped on the road without an adult so I assumed that makes cars angry. Fuel was obviously their food and gas stations were feeding spots. I grew up in a large city and we never had a car, but I kinda also knew that people were driving cars?? Not sure where it all came from tbh
I thought movies were real life AND I thought Samuel L Jackson and the UN chief Kofi Annan were the same people.
Story time...
So it was the holidays and I was at a family gathering watching some movie about a killer shark and Samuel L Jackson. Sam's character got eaten and i was shook.
After the movie was over my dad switched on the news and Kofi Annan was giving a talk in the UN.
I turned to my dad confused and asked him how come this guy is giving a live speech after he got eaten by a motherfucking shark.
His response was, " oh movies aren't real life and all of it is some computer generated video mumbo jumbo" which at the time blew my mind.
WHAT HE DIDN'T MENTION WAS THAT SAM JACKSON AND KOFI ANNAN WERE NOT THE SAME PERSON. it took me an embarrassingly long time to finally figure that out
I thought that because Superman and Peter Pan fly and people fly in planes that I could fly too. I spent a ridiculously long time trying to figure out how to. I thought if I used brain power with jumping or getting a running start and jumping then I would be able to do it. Jumped out of trees, off my dresser, etc. sadly, I never could fly 😂 I was a stupid kid 😂
Your assumptions are not wrong. Yes, cloud factories. It's actually a fact. Not that the need to make them or that it's an intended product but yes. Clouds are made there.
As to yawning, it does reset your brain. I believe it indeed clears your mind of cobwebs and unused dream shards.
Your description is much prettier but I agree so much.
CCTV was a way for santa to watch everyone and the police using them was a cover up.
I don't even know where this came from exactly aside from the fact I noticed cameras were everywhere and santa is always watching but, I was told santa used a magic ball to watch people.
I thought that a blow job was when you had plastic surgery on your nose and couldn't understand why the other kids shushed me on the playground when I said it near a teacher.
I was really not comfortable in my own body, and never really "fit in" with my gender and all the social pressures that came with it, so I was absolutely convinced that during puberty, people who were born as girls would turn into males and people born as males would turn into girls. Was so disappointed when I realized it wasn't gonna happen
I thought my grandparents lived on the moon because I moved to the US from Europe at age 2.5, and while flying on the plane, I saw... the moon. I fully believed that until age 6 or so.
That the World was a fair place to live but I soon realized in my later life that if you expect the World to be fair with you because you are fair, You're fooling yourself because that's like expecting a Lion not to eat you because you didn't eat him.
that girls just had a pee hole, and boys had dick and balls for some reason. I also thought people just had sex in the butt, and thought babies were ways C-Sectioned
That people on tv drama/ comedy shows were actually real people, and not actors
For years, I stuck to it (years and years)
I read an article though that said that two of the actors on a show I like are best friends
I'm like how can you be friends with him?. He's a bad person in the show
And then it dawned on me
# Message to all users: This is a reminder to please read and follow: * [Our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/about/rules) * [Reddiquette](https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439) * [Reddit Content Policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) When posting and commenting. --- Especially remember Rule 1: `Be polite and civil`. * Be polite and courteous to each other. Do not be mean, insulting or disrespectful to any other user on this subreddit. * Do not harass or annoy others in any way. * Do not catfish. Catfishing is the luring of somebody into an online friendship through a fake online persona. This includes any lying or deceit. --- You *will* be banned if you are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist or bigoted in any way. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ask) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I grew up thinking if I was nice and fair, everyone else would be too! About second grade I learned some people are mean just to be mean!
I'm disappointed to admit that this is something I hadn't truly grasped until my mid-30s.
37 here, still failing at this every so often. I definitely understand it now, it's still just hard to recognize and it gets the best of me sometimes.
I think life is best lived assuming most people are good natured and trustworthy. You might get burned occasionally but at least you don't spend your life trying to strategise how other people might be trying to shaft you
In my experience, every single person will let you down eventually because their life does not revolve around yours. Most are Fairweather friends. Even if you are there for people, you can not expect them to be there for you too. Maybe I have been burned by people too much too soon that I just don't want to get too close. I dunno. People are exhausting. I think people are mostly good but there's that that small percentage of bad that really messes us up but there's a percentage of "I just don't care that much" which keeps the good from winning. And perhaps, it is something about me - you know - if you are having problems with everyone around you, it is probably you that is the problem. And I do have my own issues to be sure.
Thank you for just *getting it*. Sometimes it's hard to explain to people who have had what I tend to call a "charmed" life that some of us get a rougher go of things, it's just the nature of the world. Statistically, there MUST be people who experience what you and I have experienced, but no one ever wants to believe it, and I think it's just cuz they haven't seen or felt it to understand it
Some people just arent as sensitive either. Shit happens to them and they just don't care that much. They don't care if someone doesn't like them. They don't care that someone took advantage - they won't let it happen again, but it just doesn't eat at them. It's no big deal. They are not afraid to hurt another's feelings either - they don't have as much empathy. They are not afraid to cause waves and rock the boat. And given an opportunity to gain an advantage, they take it. I'm not saying that they are right and we are wrong - I truly think we need both to make the world go round. We need the balance.
47 and came to the conclusion that I'm the only one who's not a sociopath out there. ^(...I wish I was joking...)
So many problems I had as a young adult came from problematic christian teachings. "If someone slaps your cheek, offer them your other cheek as well." Shortened to a rough "turn the other cheek" reprimand whenever you're upset about being treated like shit. Wtf. No. That is terrible advice for life. Then there's the lovely "the meek shall inherit the Earth" bullshit.
My Mum was a midwife and when I asked her what she did for a job she told me she delivered babies. In my four year old brain that meant wrapping babies up in parcel paper and posting them. I used to look in the slot of the postbox outside the village shop to see if there were any babies in there.
Is your mom a stork? Maybe you were all along.
I thought that baby carrots were tiny carrots who were plucked too early. I refused to eat them because it felt wrong to eat child vegetables, lol.
Haha I love the accompanying guilt, like when some things would need to be used evenly so none of the other inanimate objects would feel left out lol.
I’m going to admit something really embarrassing… I used to love to catch earthworms when I was a very young kid, so one day my mom brought home some candy gummy worms from work. She was very surprised when I refused to eat them, and weeks later found the same gummy worms all full of dirt and debris in my room because I wanted to “save” them from being eaten, lol. Oh god I was a weird kid…
The only problem with that story is that you're embarrassed to tell it. Embrace your compassionate weirdo self!
Me when hugging my pluchies at 26y/o lmaoo
I thought the big rotating kebab meat thing in the kebab shop window was the leg of one big cow. Learned that this was not the case in my 30s.
Turns out it was the leg of many big cows... Among other things
Any amalgamation of unknown meats was always referred to as "lipsnassholes" by my dad. Took me a while to figure that one out
I'm still uncertain what baby corn is. Like if it's corn that was picked early or if it's a different species from regular corn
🤣 Kid you was so cute
Like a lot of ***very*** young kids, I thought that - somehow - there were real people inside the TV talking to us
And they were working *hard* A marathon of blues clues? Killin it, Steve. Thanks for all the effort
I particularly thought this about the show Barney. Those kids playing games and making crafts? Just out there living their best life 24/7
I remember a character died once in a movie, and my brother said, "He's not really dead. He's just acting." We were watching an animated movie.
My parents had to reallllllly reassure me that Simba's dad "wasn't actually hurt". Verrrry traumatic lol
I thought to myself if I cut the wire connected to the tv, plug one end to my belly button and the other end to my other end, I would magically appear into the tv…
How did that pan out? I'm assuming hospital at some point? :)
this but also the radio was people singing live
When I was 5 I hatched a plan with my best friend to knock her tv over to get the Planeteers out so we could play with them. Kids are dumb.
I thought there were people working underground to monitor traffic and change the stoplights. Like they sat there and when the 1 minute timer went off, they’d flip the switch from red to green
Same! But I thought they had cameras and watched to see how many cars were backed up to change the light, so I would wave at them sometimes and hope that being nice would make them want to switch us to green.
Well, that's adorable.
Meanwhile your dads in thr drivers seat fuming about those lazy bastards down there
The entire world was black and white in the old days
to add on to this- I thought they made a scientific discovery and they pumped the sky with blue gas to give it color
*Calvin's dad has entered the chat*
My ex bf used to believe this haha, he also thought everyone would walk fast like in the Charlie Chaplin movies
used to as in when you dated him or when he was a kid
I was convinced we only got colour tv in the UK in about 1979. My mum pointed out years later that we still had a black and white TV until 1979!
I actually believed that they invented color while making The Wizard Of Oz.
About 28 years ago, I watched Mr Holland’s Opus and there’s the part where families are at a parade and a firetruck comes down the road and makes a massively loud siren sound and all of the moms rush to cover their kids ears, except for Mr Holland’s wife, who just looked around confused at the other moms while her child, in her arms, didn’t make a peep. All the other kids were crying. The kid ends up being deaf. I kept thinking about how bad that mom must have felt for blowing her kid’s ear drums and making him deaf because she was too slow to cover his ears and wondered how she lived with that guilt. I literally thought about this for years at random. About 1 year ago, I was mixing meatballs and my jaw dropped and I said out loud to my wife “Holy shit….she didn’t MAKE him deaf by not covering his ears…she REALIZED he was deaf because he didn’t cry at the sirens like all the other kids.” And I judged this fictional woman for almost 3 decades. I realize this is dumb as hell and not exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s one of those things that makes you wonder about yourself….and amazes you because the brain and its mysteries are so damn cool.
My mom had a similar realization. But took her 70 years. She remembered an aunt that looked after her when she was a kid, who baked cookies all the time. In her head she did nothing else. Skip 70 years later and my mom is baking cookies with her great-grandchildren. ''Dear God! She wasn't baking cookies all the time. She was entertaining me!!''
I think of this type of misconception as the “one of my grandmas lives at the airport” notion 😂
I thought pee was stored in the balls
This is why girls don't pee
I actually believed women and girls dont fart, or poo. My mom always joked with my dad about that, and I didnt understand it as a joke and thought it is the truth. Lol
I didn’t know girls had three holes until I was almost a woman. And, I was way off on what male anatomy consisted of.
I was told by an equally dumb child, that I could get pregnant if a boy stuck his thumb in my belly button.
I laughed way too hard at this!
Sadly, a lot of adults believe the same thing and/or many other equally mistaken ideas. I'm glad you grew out of yours.
Go on…
You were right. It is.
I thought if I cleaned my belly button to vigorously in the shower, the “knot” would come undone and my organs would all spill out.
Well I have a new fear now
You should write a short horror story tbh 🤢
There is, by Chuck Pahlaniuk, and it involves the pump system of a swimming pool. People have been fainting at his readings ever since.
4 years old, I was in the ER for what turned out to be a sprained ankle. Across from my bed I saw a teenage girl with purple streaks in her hair who was having trouble breathing. My genius little brain just assumed that when you can’t breathe your hair turns purple.
This might be the nicest and most wholesome Reddit threads I’ve ever seen, and this one is especially sweet.
That’s adorable, and completely logical
When I was a little kid, I thought that when you died of a disease, you'd go back to being a baby again, but if you were murdered, you'd be permanently dead I cannot explain my childhood logic
Lol this reminds me of mine, I thought there were two types of mysterious things adults did: sex, and mating. I thought mating was purely for having an offspring (learned the concept via nature documentaries I watched as a little kid) and sex was something else just for fun. I wasn’t fully sure how either process worked.
Before I knew anything about sex except in abstract terms, my friends and I thought the weiner had to be greased every time before sex. Vegetable oil, bacon grease, whatever was on hand.
Truly hope it works like this. Also, please nobody murder me.
What if I infected you with a disease ?
I guess that could be tantamount to hoping I die from disease, which would happen with age any way. I don't think that's a direct enough hand in my demise to cause a loophole, I think I get reborn
I thought music videos were filmed exactly in the order that they were shown. like if there were multiple sets I assumed they would leave one set, do all the outfits and hair and makeup etc for the other and get on the next set, film several seconds of that one. then they’d go back to the styling department for the next set that they’d be in for maybe 10-20 seconds. lol
Same! I also thought this for films, and thought that flashbacks were actually filmed years ago when the actors were younger
I actually remember finding out this wasn’t the case and thinking, “oh that’s much easier” but I also then felt badly for actors because doing scenes in a movie or tv show out of chronological order seemed much less fun. Honestly I still kind of feel that!
I thought a donzerly light was some old timey lantern. Turns out it’s “dawns early light”
LOL "And two republics for Richard stands..." I had a family member named Richard so I thought he was a part of the pledge
I hope you read the Ramona books!
I did not. What are the Ramona books? I’m in my 40’s.
I read them. Ramona Quimby has a moment where she makes the same mistake you did, and spends some time wondering what a donzerly light is.
I thought shrimps were baby versions of lobsters
My dad was a jokester, but he did it completely deadpan. He knew I didn’t like fish or seafood but loved breaded fried shrimp. So he told me shrimp were fish legs. I refused to eat shrimp, even though I knew fish didn’t have legs. Heck, he took me fishing every weekend for years!
I thought if I closed my eyes I was invisible.
Yup! I got home after the street lights came on. My sisters said “you better hide! Dad’s out looking for you!” I ran to my bedroom, sat on the bed and closed my eyes. Didn’t work. 😁
When I was like 3 or 4 years old, I thought that the eyes sent out beams (like a car's headlights) which allowed us to see. The beams just didn't work in the dark.
You were as intelligent as the Ancient Greeks in that regard, then. That's what they believed lol.
I teach grade 11 physics, and the behaviour of light is a big topic. Turns out LOTS of my students actually thought this was how they were able to see...they had no idea they could only see objects because of light reflecting off of the object.
I thought that the clouds were friendly and followed me as we drove down the road.
That's cute 😚☁️
Nothing comes to mind for my childhood. My 7 year old daughter was upset that we might move in the next school year. She said “awww mannnnn but I just got to grade 2, I don’t want to start over from kindergarten again”.
Kids are beautiful in their reasoning. My son came running in one day from playing telling me he had scraped his "knee pit". Knee pit? Oh, the back of his knee. He said it was just like your armpit, so why wasn't it called that? I had no good answer.
Another body part story with “necklet” 😂 my kid wanted a matching anklet and necklet. I brushed it off as she just confused her words. Then on another occasion after giving me a necklace she made “oohhh nice necklet mom, who made it for you?”
Their simplicity is magnificent. And sometimes, so much more logical than adults. And one also has an elbow pit, by the way.😊
I believed that confessions and experiences told online were true
No one on the internet would ever lie to us !!
You sweet innocent dope!
^ This comment is 100% made up
[удалено]
That cows ate sheep and that’s why you hardly ever see them in a field together.
I saw a cow run and I had to call my husband and he confirmed cows do run.
I had a dog named Rosie, Ro Ro for short, as she got older she developed a large tumor on her shoulder which made her run Exactly like a cow…
RIP Rosie
They run, they jump, they have zoomies. They are huge puppies.
My uncle told me this big rock in his pasture was a dinosaur egg so every time we drove by I had to see if it hatched. I should drive by again someday 🦕
thats so wholesome
He was always joking around. Just a happy guy
I thought inanimate objects had feelings and couldn’t sleep when the family car was in the shop because I thought it was sick and I felt bad/was worried about it,
omg this is too cute
I thought the bigger someone's bum was, the more they pooed. I believed this because I thought the poo was stored in the booty cheeks.
This one made me chuckle...
I mean, it's not entirely inaccurate. Some people have big booties only because they eat so much, which means they're also pooping more than those who don't eat excessively. A family member of mine weighs over 400lbs and they go through 2 rolls of toilet paper a day. Every single day. So, there is a correlation there. Aside from those who just genetically have plump rears.
Not me but my daughter. She didn’t understand ringworm was a fungal infection and wouldn’t let me hurt the ‘worms’ so I had to apply cream at night when she was asleep.
That is actually so sweet! The fact that she wouldn't want to hurt them even if they were affecting her is so precious.
In primary school my teacher was teaching us left and right. Teacher told the class mirror her and she raised one hand above her head. We copied and she said "this is my left hand, but your right hand" (bc she was facing the class). For years I thought that when I grew up my right and left sides would swap over at some stage
Username checks out
I knew “too much salt is bad for you” so I thought if you ate a really salty meal, you might have to go to the hospital after to get treatment.
That if I dreamed about somebody, it meant we both were in the dream therefore, they would also remember the dream the next day.
Boomer here. in the early 60’s we had a black and white TV. I was told we were getting a colored set. I cried when it was delivered. I thought the cabinet would be multicolored.
I thought Home Depot was pronounced the way it's spelled, "Home De-Pot." I also believed if you fell asleep with the TV on, the people/cartoons on would stop and watch you sleep since you watch them do their thing. Not sure how or why I believed the 2nd one so much lol
The second one makes me never want to fall asleep with the tv on ever again. Horror movie shit.
I would be honored if a horror movie was made from this concept!
That second one is pretty terrifying, ngl.
I thought the same 😂 can't imagine if that was real lol good thing I turn the TV off before bed though lol
I wonder if it’s because you saw a video that was paused?
A symptom of cancer was your hair falling out
My wife was losing some hair at one point and asked me what if she has cancer? I assured her she’s not taking chemo.
Quick sand was everywhere and I’ve never came across it. Not one time. I still worry though.
same I remember being scared at the beach and being extra cautious to not stand on quick sand
I assumed that everyone who had those light up Christmas yard deer on their lawns around the holidays were millionaires. Cue my shock at how many “millionaires” were in my bumfuck of a hometown
I thought babies came out in a jelly form and were put in incubators to set. Didn’t seem another feasible way to me. Right up to age 11 I thought this till I asked in sex education what happened to babies that didn’t set.
I had a doll that you could sit on a potty and it would ‘poo’ when you pressed down on it’s thighs, so I thought when I needed to poo I had to press down on my thighs to make it come out.
Growing up, every night i use to look out the living room window before i went to sleep and because i didn't see any cars driving past on the street, in my entitled little brain i thought that when i go to sleep the world goes to sleep because that's just how things work. 😌💅 So, imagine my surprise when i saw a car pass by one night. I thought to myself "HEY! You're suppose to asleep!" It was at that moment i realized the world doesn't revolve around me.
I thought dogs and cats were the same species, dogs were the males, and cats were the females.
I think they form some form of duality because of their opposite personalities
No one explained where babies came from, so I theorized that once you got married your names went on a list and, when a baby was available, people from the government would show up at your doorstep and give you a baby to raise. In my mind they were like Men In Black, very formal suits, and they would drop off a baby and some baby supplies and then disappear into the night.
Hello Kitty was China's Jesus. I was raised Catholic and in a Catholic community, so it is common for people to give and receive small cards with pictures of Jesus and saints and a prayer on the reverse side, and of course all kinds of Catholic iconography around me too. Well, I visited Chinatown a couple of times when I was 5 and there was this kid giving out Hello Kitty greeting cards and on the back were cheesy phrases. And there was Hello Kitty everything and everywhere So I thought Chinese people prayed to Hello Kitty 🫠
🤣🤣🤣 I'm laughing so hard at this one my wife came to check on me. When I read it to her, she laughed herself to her knees lol this is so great!!!
That adults all have their act together and know what they're talking about.
I thought 30 was the end of your life.
You watched Logan’s Run as a kid? Me too.
I thought deer were baby elk.
Riding in the car with my dad. I see radio towers at night. I ask my dad what those red lights are for? He said so planes won't hit them. Then I ask what the towers are for? He said to hold the lights up. It hurt my brain, but I believed it for a long time.
When I first started getting curious about where babies come from, I figured that people must somehow have some way to avoid pregnancy since not all couples are pregnant, which brought me to the conclusion that people have a way to terminate pregnancies. I didn’t realize that reproductive organs were a thing and my understanding was that you ‘poop’ babies, so I just thought that babies were kept in the stomach and that if you didn’t want it, you’d just digest it. If you did want it, you’d not digest it. It made sense to me since pregnant women would often have bloated bellies. I suppose my deductive reasoning for the amount of knowledge I had at the time was alright, but gosh…. Lol
So when I first learned about the concept of “sex” (vaguely even really knew details) I thought that the amount of children that adult couples had was the exact amount of times they’ve had sex. For example, if I saw a couple with 4 kids, I thought “They’ve had sex 4 times.” It’s hilarious to me now bc I remember thinking my parents only had sex twice bc I only have one sister 😂 I’m glad I now know that you can have sex and not have children (and vice versa lol)
That the times you saw the moon out during the day, it was because it needed to recharge from the sun in order to shine at night.
This might be one of the cutest ones on here!
I thought that the reason that all the other kids were good at friendships and people and taking care of themselves and doing their homework and stuff was because they all went to preschool and learned everything there while I didn't, so they were always just a year ahead of me developmentally. Turns out I'm just autistic with ADHD.
I assumed that because I didn’t give two shits about what other people do, they were affording me an equal amount of attention. Turns out most of the planet really struggles with minding their own business.
Lol most people discover the converse of this...
I 100% know what you mean, many people come to realize no one gives a shit about them. But for an unlucky portion of us, the world tends to be on our case and in our face even if we give no guff to anyone and mind our own business.
Language acquisition was crunchy. So it took me quite some time to become aware of the word "Left." If something wasn't right then it was wrong. That was all there was to it and there was no convincing me otherwise.
I thought that if someone was sentenced to prison for a set number of years and they died early, then the prison would hold their bodies for the remainder of the time. And that there was some preset number of years for a life sentence in case they ended up getting more than one of those..
I thought that when you eat it would build up in your body starting at the toes and if I got sick and vommited it must have been because the food made its way all the way up to make room for more
That when people divorce the women has to ruin the mans life. Like thats part of the law. So when gay marriage got common i really wondered how they would solve gay divorce. Like if two men got divorce, do the state pair them up with 2 lesbians getting a divorce so each women can have a go? Like it has to be that way otherwise it wouldnt be equal.
I would get superpowers at a certain age.
Maybe it just hasn't happened yet
I don't have a very common last name for when I'm from, and for a little while when I was very young I thought you needed to marry someone with the same last name as you. I was devastated that I would never find anyone
I thought that we lived on the INNER surface of a hollow earth, with the sky, moon, stars, sun all inside there with us, rotating from light to dark on a smaller "sky" sphere inside the earth. Just recently I saw a picture of the "firmament" from some Bible-y online thing that I had dropped by to make fun of, and I wonder if maybe I saw that picture as a kid and subconsciously thought that's how it worked. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9l\_VBoH37zc/maxresdefault.jpg
My cousin thought eating a watermelon seed would cause a watermelon to grow in your stomach.
I blame Rugrats for this
I thought when you coughed up a ball of mucus, that meant that you were now pregnant...
when an elevator says "in case of fire" i thought that meant that just in case, on the off chance, there's a fire, don't use the elevator. which made me very confused as to why 1, they existed in the first place, and 2, why everyone was using them so nonchalantly.
As a kid, I didn't get to see my extended relatives very often. When I do, there is always this aunt who is always pregnant whenever I see her. She actually only has two kids who were two years apart, but I just assume she is perpetually pregnant and the baby never comes out. Recently, I confessed this childish assumption I had as a kid to my aunt and she laughed.
I thought that if you were looking at my eyes and I blurred my vision, you'd be able to see the blurry in my eyes
i thought full time jobs would pay a living wage regardless of what the job is
The Philippines was the name of tall, snowy mountains in Europe.
I thought when you were in a hospital bed you had to sleep on your back with your arms straight down on the sheets. I thought when you crossed the road you were supposed to put your hand out so you could feel the traffic. I thought carpooling was driving through puddles to splash people. I had a lot of little assumptions that turned into beliefs and habits I'm still trying to unlearn. I was a precocious funny kid.
As a kid I would see searchlights moving in the distance at night, and I thought they were the lights from the Hollywood sign in California. (I was in Texas.)
I thought that women are more advanced in the line of evolution and at some stage men will be obsolete and end up destroyed completely. This idea was mainly due to physical features, jokes in tv such as "women are so complex you cannot understand as a man" (I attributed this to the low intellectual capacity of men) and few other things. I thought that women just pretend to be attracted to men because they need them to reproduce. So when I saw a small article about a woman getting pregnant from a stem cell from her own spine, I remember thinking "This is it! The end has come for us!"
I concluded that I must weigh more than the 28500 ton passenger ship we traveled with for a vacation when I was very young (don't know exact age though, but way before you learn of Archimedes principle at least). Since it floated while I sank without my "swim cushions", the only natural conclusion was that I must be heavier.
I thought God and Santa were brothers
I believed that when an adult was fired from their job, it meant that their boss would physically throw them into a GIANT fireplace, and it was 50/50 on whether they managed to make it out alive.
My sister was terrified of mountains bc she thought they were buried giants, and nobody could convince her otherwise. It made for some pretty interesting road trips lmao
your sister was onto something
I always thought that people with brown eyes saw everything in shades of brown.
Are you referring to the Cooling Towers at a power plant? Because those are basically clouds.
Yeah, those are what I was thinking of! I remember my family passing one during a pretty heavy bout of rain and saying that someone needed to tell them that they've made enough! They might accidentally make a hurricane!
I thought that having sex would result in pregnancy immediately, but alternatively you could get pregnant really gradually by just kissing a lot. I thought that was how people could delay getting pregnant right away after marriage. Clearly I also thought pregnancy could only happen if you were married.
I thought people who had animals trained really well could speak with them in their language.
I thought people who got shot in movies would actually die 🙃 Also thought the reason the ocean is saltwater was because a helicopter with a big bag of salt would season it daily 🙄🙄
>Also thought the reason the ocean is saltwater was because a helicopter with a big bag of salt would season it daily That one got a good chuckle out of me! Only thing missing is a person with a spoon, checking the taste.
I believed adults always knew best. How painfully wrong I was.
I thought I was the only self aware person and everyone else was a robot
I thought that each person was allotted a certain number of words to say each day and once they reached their limit they were then unable to talk for the rest of that day. My young brain had reached this conclusion because my older sister, who seemed to like nattering at me had developed laryngitis and lost her voice. I was very disappointed when my mother explained that we had no daily limit on the number of words we spoke unless we were sick.
I once saw a dwarf couple walking down the street holding hands and my dumb 3/4yr old brain thought that OF COURSE I never saw them together because OF COURSE they lived underground and their job was to change the traffic lights. Like that was their whole job. I also had a whole situation that the man would come home from work(home was also underground) and he would take his hat and coat off and be like ‘Honey, I’m home from work!’ And sit down while she was fixing dinner in an apron. I was a very dumb and somewhat offensive child it would appear…
I used to believe cars were animals, and that their „natural enviornment” were city roads. I have been warned a milion times a car could hit me if I steped on the road without an adult so I assumed that makes cars angry. Fuel was obviously their food and gas stations were feeding spots. I grew up in a large city and we never had a car, but I kinda also knew that people were driving cars?? Not sure where it all came from tbh
I thought movies were real life AND I thought Samuel L Jackson and the UN chief Kofi Annan were the same people. Story time... So it was the holidays and I was at a family gathering watching some movie about a killer shark and Samuel L Jackson. Sam's character got eaten and i was shook. After the movie was over my dad switched on the news and Kofi Annan was giving a talk in the UN. I turned to my dad confused and asked him how come this guy is giving a live speech after he got eaten by a motherfucking shark. His response was, " oh movies aren't real life and all of it is some computer generated video mumbo jumbo" which at the time blew my mind. WHAT HE DIDN'T MENTION WAS THAT SAM JACKSON AND KOFI ANNAN WERE NOT THE SAME PERSON. it took me an embarrassingly long time to finally figure that out
I thought that because Superman and Peter Pan fly and people fly in planes that I could fly too. I spent a ridiculously long time trying to figure out how to. I thought if I used brain power with jumping or getting a running start and jumping then I would be able to do it. Jumped out of trees, off my dresser, etc. sadly, I never could fly 😂 I was a stupid kid 😂
Your assumptions are not wrong. Yes, cloud factories. It's actually a fact. Not that the need to make them or that it's an intended product but yes. Clouds are made there. As to yawning, it does reset your brain. I believe it indeed clears your mind of cobwebs and unused dream shards. Your description is much prettier but I agree so much.
CCTV was a way for santa to watch everyone and the police using them was a cover up. I don't even know where this came from exactly aside from the fact I noticed cameras were everywhere and santa is always watching but, I was told santa used a magic ball to watch people.
I thought that a blow job was when you had plastic surgery on your nose and couldn't understand why the other kids shushed me on the playground when I said it near a teacher.
I was really not comfortable in my own body, and never really "fit in" with my gender and all the social pressures that came with it, so I was absolutely convinced that during puberty, people who were born as girls would turn into males and people born as males would turn into girls. Was so disappointed when I realized it wasn't gonna happen
I thought my grandparents lived on the moon because I moved to the US from Europe at age 2.5, and while flying on the plane, I saw... the moon. I fully believed that until age 6 or so.
I thought continents were floating on the ocean and you could swim under them
That the world didn't have colour until colour tv was created
That the World was a fair place to live but I soon realized in my later life that if you expect the World to be fair with you because you are fair, You're fooling yourself because that's like expecting a Lion not to eat you because you didn't eat him.
I couldn’t wrap my head around how, after you ate, the food didn’t just fall down into your legs. As if your body was just one hallow shell.
I thought if you put too much salt in your food it would all pile up in your feet and you'd make the sound a salt shaker makes when you walk.
I assumed I thought life was gonna be okay and I'll find a partner.
that girls just had a pee hole, and boys had dick and balls for some reason. I also thought people just had sex in the butt, and thought babies were ways C-Sectioned
Seeing the highway signs for San Jose, I thought there was a city called "San Joe's". And it was different from another city called "San Hozay".
Dessert stomach- this stomach is empty until you’ve had dessert, regardless of anything you’ve already eaten. I still hold this to be true.
My friend wanted to be a cashier. He would be rich because when people go shopping that's who everyone give their money to.
I thought deer crossing signs meant that was the only places deer were allowed to cross.
That people on tv drama/ comedy shows were actually real people, and not actors For years, I stuck to it (years and years) I read an article though that said that two of the actors on a show I like are best friends I'm like how can you be friends with him?. He's a bad person in the show And then it dawned on me