What is the one most astonishingly dumb things that, as a child, you believed was absolute truth?
What is the one most astonishingly dumb things that, as a child, you believed was absolute truth?
I dont remember the age, but it was before Kindergarten, thought men came into the house at night to load the next days shows into the TV.
I thought adults actually knew what the hell they were doing.
I always had a suspicion but when I became an adult it was so much worse than I thought
Hahah no, there's nobody driving the bus
The call is coming from inside the bus 👻
Perhaps we should enlist some bus drivers
We all did...
I thought that when the clerk at the checkout asked, "would you like cash back?" That you could say yes and they would just give you cash straight out of the register for nothing lol.
I figured that most people were very honest and didn't need the money, so they would just say no thanks and leave it in the register for somebody who really did need it.
Similarly, I thought one could get more money by asking for change. You give one bill, you get more bills and coins in return, it's gotta be more, right?
I thought grownups got paid every day and “pay day” was just a special day when you got more money.
Aww that's adorable 🤣
So many things...
I didn't understand how lie detectors were supposed to work so I thought you could hook someone up and ask something like "does god exist" and you'd be able to get answers to all of life's big mysteries.
I thought there was a left and right sock
I thought wolverines were mythical creatures
I thought if I tried hard enough I could somehow become older than my older brother like it was just a title or something
Thanks to DARE any time I saw a skittle with the S missing I thought it was drugs even in a newly opened package
I could go on..
I wanted an older sibling as a child and I remember trying to convince my parents they should have another baby. In my mind, if I just waited (my age +1) years, I'd then have an older sibling. It never ocurred to me that I would also age during that time...
Your comment about your brother reminds me that in kindergarten I thought that the line order (alphabetical) had something to do with status. My last name starts with C so I was pretty close to the front, but I had a friend with an A for a last name, so I really wanted to move up.
I told no one of this of course until long after I'd grasped how alphabetical ordering worked myself.
TIL; wolverine is an actual fuckin' animal!!!!!!
I hope you're about 25 because this is basically how I found out lol
I remember thinking that women gave birth to girls and men gave birth to boys, and being really worried because I (as a guy) didn't want to give birth.
I'm seeing several posts that are startling evidence for the essential nature of proper sex education, lol.
I thought older girls went to bed one night then the next morning they had boobs
Well, this was when I was like 6 or so; I can't fault the school system.
Wonder how the world population would look like if this was true
I was trying to figure out what caused wind. I noticed the leaves moving when the wind blew, and I knew that a fan (handheld) also moved wind. So it stood to reason that trees moved causing the leaves to move which caused the wind. And naturally it must be earthquakes that caused the tree to love. And then I thought, we’ll there must be a master tree that started the wind, and the most “logical” place for that tree would be the North Pole.
So, that there was a tree on the North Pole that caused all the wind.
Pretty sure that could be the basis for a series of children's novels that were eventually adapted into a trilogy (or more) of movies.
It's a trilogy of children's books, where the first two get a movie each and the last book is split into 2.
I like your thought process. You might be on to something...
Except for the North Pole, I had the exact same idea. I got to the idea of a single tree controlling things then got my hands on a Red Ryder Carbine-action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle and forgot about trees.
Meet your soulmate: https://feddit.de/comment/2775718
That sheep and goats were same species. I thought sheep were the girl versions and goats were the boys, like hens and roosters.
Wasn't until well into my 20s that I finally ran into something that put the spotlight on it... IIRC it was some Farmville type of videogame, which included males and females of both sheep and goats. To me, that stood out the same way a "female bull" or "male cow" would have, so I had a little chuckle at the obvious 'oversight'. Realized shortly after that I was, in fact, a fucking idiot.
Similar to this: I thought that deer was the male and roe was the female of the same species.
exactly what I used to think!
Depends on your definition of species. Sheep and goats are closely related enough to mate and produce offspring
Can't wait to get some geep milk
Did not know that. I feel slightly vindicated!
My dad told me that walnuts were owl eggs.
He got in trouble when I stole all the walnuts in the house and wrapped them in nose tissues to keep them warm so they would hatch and I would have baby owls.
I thought CEOs worked super hard
💀
I thought black and what television was black and white because history happened in black and white. I suppose that means life in colour happened after the invention of colour tv
The invention of color was a big deal
One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbies about this topic.
My eyes only got 66% of the update.
I think they just brought it back from Oz.
Pleasantville: a documentary
I thought that if enough time passed old photos would turn black and white like how they were b&w in the 80s and turned colour in the 90s.
That adult humans knew what they were doing and had things in hand.
When I was five or six, I think I must have dreamed that my dad could turn his head around 360 degrees. A few days later I was in the car with my Dad and asked him if he could really turn his head around. He responded "not now, I'm driving." I took that as a yes. It was years before I realized the truth...
I laughed so hard 😂 not even questioning wth you’re talking about, just going straight for the worldview altering statement. I can only wish I had that much wit and humor.
Grew up on a dairy goat farm. I noticed we ate most of the boys and kept all the girls.
I was so scared; I had to ask my mom which one of me and my brothers were they gonna keep.
If you were cold then you would catch a cold.
You had to wait an hour after eating because if you swam after eating then you would sink.
Carrots will allow me to see in the dark if I eat enough of them.
If you did a bad thing then the universe would make a bad thing happen to you.
If you dropped food on the ground and picked it up quick enough it didn't have germs.
That's more of a "believing lies told my adults around you" case.
Carrots will allow me to see in the dark if I eat enough of them.
This was (and is) a very successful British WWII misinformation campaign. The Brits didn't want it known that their aircraft had radar - which allowed them to find enemy aircraft at night. So they embellished carrots' benefit on night vision to cover up their technological advantage.
It worked. Don't feel bad for believing it. Everyone believed it.
If you were cold then you would catch a cold.
There is a startling amount of people here (most people I know) that believe this. I work in healthcare and we constantly have arguments about the AC in summer for that exact reason. Yeah cold weather can make it easier to catch a cold but it's interesting to see how many people believe that you need to get warm to avoid catching a cold.
Carrots will allow me to see in the dark if I eat enough of them.
Partially true. If you're vitamin A deficient, your night vision worsens and carrots can help with that. But you won't get Minecraft night vision
Believing in karma isn't bad, though. If it helps being a better person, then why not.
It didn't help me be better at that age because I lacked the forward thinking ability to weighthe consequences. It did make me scared that something bad was going to happen after I'd done something bad. Which is kind of good I guess.
99% of Indians still believe the first one. They also believe that if you don't immediately dry your hair right after a shower you'll catch a cold. Sneezing and coughing without covering your mouth though? That's ok.
The world believed carrots made you have better vision. It is an interesting story and worth looking into.
I thought cats were female and dogs were male. Can you tell I didn't have pets growing up?
I know a disturbingly high number of adults over 40 that refer to every dog as he/him and every cat as she/her no matter how many thousands of times they are corrected on it.
Have you been around girls and boys. This makes perfect sense. I think the science might be wrong.
I still say this but I know it isn't true.
I remember asking my dad if the Earth ever got heavier besides when meteors landed and babies were born.
I couldn’t comprehend that babies were made out of food. I thought they just came from nothing.
"babies were made of food" gave me a chuckle! a bit of a shower thought moment :)
Apart from the babies thing, that's still a very interesting question. I bet someone knows the answer, but I wonder if the weight of the earth increases or decreases on average. I'd have to guess it's a net increase from picking up stuff as we move through space, which probably dwarfs the mass of stuff we've sent out (especially if you don't count satellites since they're more or less still tied to earth). I don't think there's anything like natural ejections of matter from earth either.
If I recall correctly, it decreases. We lose more weight of atmospheric gas than we gain weight of meteorite material.
Additional external mass is additional mass. shrug
I believed until I was 8 or so that beans were a type of meat. When I learned the truth, I had an argument with my older brother with me saying something along the line, "You're gonna feel real dumb when Mom says I'm right."
I'll admit to thinking this too
and beingwhen I was a little bit older than 8, so you can feel better now.
Adults act mature and rationally
I used to believe in God, that was super stupid looking back.
Being a hard worker gets you places.
I thought peas were little unborn animals. Because they had a "cocoon". Refused to eat peas for years.
My alcoholic aunt scared me out of eating broccoli for most of my life. When I was ~5 I was watching Powerpuff girls and there was an episode where broccoli aliens attack earth. My aunt told me if I kept eating broccoli I would turn into a broccoli monster like the ones on TV. I fucking love broccoli and only found out when I was 18 or 19. I could've been eating broccoli this whole time and I'll never forgive my aunt or my stupidity for the countless years wasted not eating it.
Sounds just like Futurama's Popplers.
I imagined them more like the tiny foetuses of some kind of butterfly/moth-type creature.
Popplers actually look delicious.
There was a coca cola plant in my hometown. When we were kids, my dad used to tell us that the huge water tanks that were painted as coke and sprite cans actually contained soda and I always imagined diving in them. Obviously he was just fucking with us, but I actually believed it for a while.
That me parents didn't have parents growing up. It somehow never dawned on me until I was like 7 that my grandparents were their parents, despite knowing my grandparents all my life.
That your tongue is divided into segments which each can only taste certain flavors
They taught us this one at school for some reason. Never fell for it though because have you ever had food?
I thought that cars were powered by the jet propulsion coming from the exhaust pipe.
...are they not?
Nope, much like politicians its just hot air and waste products serving no useful purpose.
How did you think reverse worked?
Sucking in air. It definitely makes sense when you're a kid lol
I don't think I thought that all the way through.
Homer Simpson wrote The Odyssey. I didn't know about any other Homer 🤷♂️
Now that I think about it, I don't know of any Homer's besides these two
Also, that all cats were girls and all dogs were boys.
This is a common one, and I want to know why.
I mean, dogs have their junk just hanging down. Cats don't. I'd guess that's what it is.
If you cut your own hair, it won't grow back. That was a lie my mum told me (after I experimented with the scissors). I believed her for years because there was a gap in my hairline. Eventually I realised "how would the hair know who cut it?" The gap in my hairline was just my parting.
I believed LCD screens in digital watches were made of mercury (they were silver after all), which I knew was toxic. I thought that if you touched the display directly, you'd die. One day, I'd disassembled a cheap watch to see how it worked - I took everything apart back then, eventually I got good at putting them back together again. Drove my parents mad, but these days they always have something for me to fix whenever I go round.
Anyway, I had this watch in pieces, handling the innards like an IED, but disaster! I brushed the back of the screen with a fingertip.I was dead. It was just a matter of time. I didn't cry or run for help, nothing could be done, I was resigned to my fate.
After about an hour of continued existence I began to doubt my assumptions. It dawned on me that something so frighteningly lethal wouldn't be simply handed to children with nothing but a cheap, press fit case! That said this was in the 80s, and back the I also believed it was both safe and fun to help demolish an asbestos cement outbuilding by jumping on the sheets to smash them into little pieces. That one might still get me, we'll see.Man survived death, congrats
Believed this until I was like 16 and so did everyone else in our school.
A girl did anal and got pregnant and since it was anal that got her pregnant she was gonna poop out the baby. Funny thing is I was part of the group conversation that started this rumor and STILL we all believed it. 😭
There has never been a bigger argument for the essential need for proper sex education.
NSFW warning. I thought sex had to be anal. Just by the looks, it was impossible that a penis could pass through a vulva, and poop made it evident that it could pass through the rectum.
OP, that thing you used to believe is disturbing as fuck.
Somehow I learned about sex before vaginas and thought sex had to be with butts because everyone had a penis. 🤣
I thought superheroes were real and all lived in New York. To be fair, it was my only contact with Western culture.
never been to times square? spiderman and thor are walking around and will take a photo with you for five bucks. the one thing people dont know is they have very thick foreign accents, which change depending on the day of the week for some reason
That's just their fake accent so they won't reveal their secret identity.
If you stir chocolate milk counter-clockwise you can separate the milk and chocolate syrup.
In order to learn how to whistle you had to eat enough pickles first.
Found a rock that kind of looked like a coin and thought I could carve it into a passable counterfeit and repeat enough times to become rich.
I might need more explanation for the pickles...
I feel like it's pretty clear:
-
eat pickles
-
whistle
-
I thought that when you peed, your pee would go to a place where it was manually boiled on a stove, making it 100% clean drinking water, and then when you turned on the tap, they would get a garden hose and pour water into the pipe that gave you water. Somehow I assumed this all would be done manually with normal sized stoves and kettles, and that each tap had it's very own pipe.
I also thought that black people were just tanned, because colder countries had white people and warmer ones had black or brown people. Then I asked myself: why are there black people in cold places? I came to the conclusion that all the black kids in my kindergarten would eventually lose their tan and become white.
I was assured that power-hungry politicians would face checks and balances, and get voted out for saying insane things.
That's the case in most countries.
I thought vaginas were just hiding 20-30 tiny miniature penises inside, and that's why they couldn't use urinals because it would spray everywhere
When I was young, my mom told me that Dad went to work too make money. In my head, I had envisioned him going to an office and running machines that made coins. Imagine my disappointment when I got to visit him at work and there were no coin making machines.
You were crushed that your father wasn't a money counterfeiter.
My parents work at the job factory and make taxes!
When I learned balls have a significant role in child-making my first though was women got pregnant by surgically transfering a man's testicle to their belly. Then I realized balls come in two's and I do in fact have more than one sibling
So many posts here are examples of why robust sexual education is a dire necessity, lol.
When did you figure out that you were adopted?
I thought when my mom said she would drop things off at Goodwill, she meant a giant, hollow wooden wheel full of tumbling clothing called Good Wheel. I imagined it looked a lot like a water wheel at a mill.
How do you get wheel from will? Your mom have a weird accent or something?
The southern USA is full of people who talk like that.
Maybe. My mom does have a mild mid-western drawl, but I think at that age I just wasn't familiar with what will or goodwill was.
Girls pee out of their butts.
Well.. a lot of womens night club bathrooms would argue a diet of vodka and coke does make you pee out your butt!!
ones with IBS do
Because radio stations' DJs would say "and here's artist with song name", I firmly believed that one of two things must be true:
Radio stations had the bands always playing live for them
And/or
Radio stations would present a local DJ, but they would then tune in to the artist playing the track live for a larger station
What's even funnier about this is that my dad has at the time taught me how to use a tape deck to record radio and CDs to tape. So I clearly understood recording mediums. Just, the idea still lingered in my mind for a while.
That sun and moon switch places during day and night. Like in a cartoon.
To be fair, a considerable number of cartoons actively portray exactly that.
When I was a kid and McDonald's started to became a thing here I was scared that Ronald McDonald would be at the restaurant. When I was invited to a birthday party and the parents wanted to take us to McDonald's I refused to go inside and the dad had to wait with me on the parking lot until my parents picked me up. I also figured that he could potentially be at Burger King, so I never went there either.
Each video game copy was customized and knew exactly what you would try to do always.
Not from button inputs. That never crossed my mind. Literally thought it was some magical fake interactive movie and the wizards who made them accounted for everything and knew you better than you did.
Needless to say, learning about code and how you can make things read button inputs was a mind-blowing moment for me. I learned what the secret behind the magic was.
I have ever since then been far more curious on how and why things work. Learning about the methods behind the magics.
How old were you? It seems so wild that you'd be young enough to not understand that the button inputs had any effect, but old enough to understand the concept of coding
Probably around 8-10ish?
I knew people MADE the games. I just thought that the how involved so much more super-genius level of predicting the future and several times tried to ‘test’ that by doing weird things like waiting 5 minutes before pressing any buttons. And was amazed that still didn’t fool it.
In Germany they put up mobil speed control and radio stations warn you about that. In German them doing this is called "blitzen" which is the same word as lightning. As a child I thought they were warning very precisely where lightning strikes were happening.
Same thing with Geisterfahrer (people driving on the wrong side of the Autobahn, lit. ghost drivers). I thought that meant that the driver had died and the car just continued driving on its own
Interesting that of the very few words I could have recognized in German that I remember that one. It used to show up in textbooks in the U.S. when studying WW2. Blitzkrieg being the German air bombings.
Now I am wracking my brain to see what other words I might remember in German.
Mostly keep going back to snitzel, beers and lederhosen. Aka the american stereotyping german restaurants (poorly Im sure). But fuck is the beer and snitzel good.... now I want a big pretzel and beer cheese. I wonder if vegans have a decent beer cheese. *wonders off to scour the internet about which animals are most prominent in German cheese, I always want to assume cows, but the Italian use of Buffalos for Motzerella always has me guessing now.
The term I was looking for was Obatzda from what I found. Stems from Bavaria and is made from cows, sheeps, and goats milk.
If someone knows a traditional recipe or which is most standard, please let me know : )
There is a god who created the world and watches our every move and we as humans are fallen creations who can't live up to his super holy expectations with our sinful lives. But don't despair just yet because that holy god has set up a blood sacrifice solution involving his own son and all you have to do to not end up in eternal damnation is to believe in the blood magic of a god for which no evidence exists whatsoever outside of the ancient myths of primitive bronze age men - a god who chooses to remain hidden for some weird reason although he apparently wants to be worshipped and believed in. Easy right? Also, if your life isn't working out quite right for some reason, that's certainly your own fault because the lord's blessings are very dependent on you doing those very fuzzily defined Jesus-ing activities right and you're quite obviously doing something very wrong, have sins in your life, aren't believing hard enough, doing it with an impure heart or whatever...
You couldn't make this shit up if you tried!
That you could catch pneumonia from breathing in steam from the shower as I heard that a symptom is water in the lungs. A friend's dad died of pneumonia and I had to shower with my head stuck out of the curtain.
I was in a hospital for 12 days that had legionnaires disease causing bacteria all through the water pipes so you had to only use cold water. The steam from hot water, inhaled, is how you get it. So, you know, you were onto something there.
That's pretty sad and terrifying for a child
Though I wasn't actually raised religiously, just the prevalence of religion in society led to many of my early theories have religious components.
I thought that between dying and being reborn you spent your time in heaven as an angel. While there, you could select your next parents from all the currently pregnant people on earth. I imagined giant 'rooms' full of computers in heaven, where every pregnant woman had a profile you could check out (mind, that was in the early 90s - I like to think I secretly invented social networking^^). Once you decided on a mother, you'd be kicked down into her womb and be reborn. I did realize pretty soon after that this theory doesn't hold water when you see that many children are not born into happy families, but for a short while I was certain I picked my mother from all the possible mothers around the world. She was very charmed by that :D
Everyone in the whole world is the world champion of something. Could be something normal like running, or jumping, but it could also be something really niche like solving the Rubik’s cube with your tongue while being under water with your hands tied behind your back. You just need to find what you’re really good at and that might be your thing.
Technically the truth. For everything there is a human who is the best at it. Although they might not know it.
I think they meant it in the other direction: Every single person in the world is the world champion of something, not every activity has a world champion.
That god was real and he actually gave a fuck about me
I don't think at any point in my childhood I took anything religious seriously. I believed in Santa longer than I believed in god.
envy
Naw, even then I had a feeling it was all a gaslight
I thought that everywhere was ocean except our town, my grandparents' town, and the interstate we used to get there.
Dude lived in that town from the Truman Show.
I thought the priest at church was Jesus.
Now that’s fuckin’ funny right there haha.
Thanks for giving me a good laugh!
I thought that all languages were actually the same, just our ears differed. So e.g. as a native German speaker, I thought all people 'speak' German (I.e. make the sounds of the German language), but the translation of sounds into thoughts by the ears would only work when the source was 'my version' of the language. Very hard to put that into words, I just realize...
Another thing was that I had my own religious philosophy. I believed in reincarnation, and thought that all life was just a giant circle where you would be reborn as your own worst victim. Only when you have lived a victimless life, you would ascend into heaven. My go-to example back then was if you stepped onto a worm you will be reborn as a worm that is being stepped on. This one has horrible victim blaming implications when you think about it but in my childlike naivety I thought it was very fair.
Cows that are completely brown give chocolate milk.
My mother said it as a joke, but at the time it made complete sense to me. By logical extension, there must’ve been a farm with pink cows for the strawberry milk.Checks out.
I knew it!
I thought that actors on TV shows and movies were acting in real time, and that they had a special ability to do the exact same thing over and over again.
As I grew in the Spanish speaking world, I also believed that Hollywood actors spoke Spanish, and that their voices changed dramatically only by switching languages.
I was a towhead, which means I was born blonde and it turned to brown as I got older. When I first started noticing my hair turning darker, I asked my mom why and she told me it was because I ate too much peanut butter. I stopped eating it for about a week until I decided that I loved peanut butter more than being a blonde.
Wow didn't know there was a name for it. That's happening for many or most Germans.
Hello, fellow towhead!
Thing is, while in every picture of me of a child I'm shockingly blonde, and every picture of me as a teen and thereafter I'm brown, I have no memory of the actual change, and no pictures where I'm in-between. Does it happen quickly? Did it hurt so badly that I've suppressed the memory‽
It's a warlock curse, cast on you as you sleep one night.
I have a few old photos were my hair looks basically striped. You can see it well when the hair is worn in a ponytail.
I remember reading a Robin Hood book when I was maybe 6 years old, and it mentioned that Robin Hood hated 'bloodshed.' I thought this was an actual shed or something where people went to fight. I hadn't learned the other meanings of 'shed' yet.
I remember watching Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. I remember that I thought he was wearing some sort of muscle prosthetics bc I thought people couldn't be that muscular. It's funny because by today's standards he wasn't buff at all.
I thought the people in movies lived in the video cassettes. I would only watch a video every once a while cause I didn't want to get them tired and or take them away from their families.
Was like 9 when I realized I was wrong. Lol.
I earnestly believed that quicksand was going to be a far more prevalent danger in my life than it has.
I thought the abbreviation for pounds (lbs) stood for "lullables."
I have no idea why.
god
Step dad convinced me that those chocolate oranges were natural from a chocolate orange tree..
my family always has a laugh when there's chocolate oranges and I'm around because the first time I had one was in high school, and when I went to unwrap it, my aunt interrupted me and said I had to hit it to break it apart. Well, nobody specified how or where to hit it, and it felt pretty solid, so I just fucking ended up vaporizing one side of the orange against a table
I started learning BASIC when I was 7 and used to think that the POKE command was a magical incantation that could do anything. Like you could make an entire game with a single POKE. You just had to find the right one.
Extreme Code Golf
You were only part wrong; POKE is magic that can do almost anything. You just have to call it a bunch.
At least, on 6502 systems, in the days of static memory layout operating systems, it was.
What about PEEK and DATA? You definitely need some PEEK and DATA statements too.
I thought for a second you ment a different kind of basic
Livestock have joyful lives before being killed peacefully 🤗
That if I went to Planet Hollywood for dinner I would definitely meet Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Me too!
The world was in black and white shortly before I was born.
I was probably in middle school when I learned the past wasn't actually in black and white. Blew my effing mind.
I don't actually remember, but I feel like it was the Wizard of Oz that got me to question my belief.
Because of Barbie dolls, I used to believe that girls didn't have nipples
I used to think Parkinson's disease was named after TV chat show host Michael Parkinson.
I know you were probably just confusing it with Lou Gehrig's disease, but this absolutely cracked me up.
I think it was just because Michael Parkinson was a prominent figure in the UK when I was a kid in the early 2000s, and Muhammad Ali was also the most prominent figure who had Parkinson's disease.
And seeing as Michael Parkinson conducted some famous interviews with Ali in the 70s and 80s, I assumed he must have caught Parkinson's from him. 😂
My mom told us that microwaves are bad for our health due to radiation. I did not want a microwave in my own apartment until I was 20 and my GF just got one.
To be fair, this one is true... Its just that they are also designed to protect you from stray microwaves lol
They're bad in that they'd cook you with enough intensity, but we don't know of other side-effects. Microwaves are not comparable to ionizing radiation like X-rays, gamma rays or ultraviolet light, which can genuinely damage your DNA.
I live in Ontario and Quebec was undergoing a referendum to leave Canada when I was a kid. I asked my Dad if Canada would still be the second biggest country if Quebec left.
He was impressed by the insightful question, but in reality I thought Quebec was just the tiny town where my Grandma lived.
That night was caused by really thick clouds. I think I saw light through dark black clouds during twilight and assumed night was caused by black clouds covering the sky. I went to test this theory by flying out of London at night but I fell asleep before we took off.
What were stars, the milky way and the moon to you?
Pinholes. No idea how I explained the moon.
I thought the world used to be black and white and turned to color sometimes in the early 60's. Ironically that's about the same time color TV came into prominence.
When I was little, I used to think that before I was born (1977), people and the world in general were in black and white. All the photos I had of my family before my birth were in black and white.
The Wizard of Oz didn't help things either.
My mother used to tell me that the jehovas witnesses had like a blacklist of households that they are forbiden from knocking on their doors since their inhabitants are unsalvable (and are going to hell according to the list but mom didnt say that) and that the peerequisits of being added to the list was not opening the door when they came to pester our house hold.
We laughed a lot about this until one day i bring it up back again and shes like "what are you talking about m8?, Theres no such thing, i made that up, i cant believe you belived that was a thing." And then she started laughing at me and made fun of that the whole day but like in a good way.
That the WWF was real
I have good news! The World Wildlife Fund IS real!
That eggs are made in factories. I still haven't made peace with this, and lurk around egg equivalents (I'm not vegan).
Also when I was in kindergarden, I had terrible idea about how the map of our village looks like.
That's not totally inaccurate. It's factory farms and not a machine factory, but still a factory.
If I had to pee really bad I would eat bread or crackers because it would absorb the pee and not make me have to go.
That my parents were people I could trust.
I thought vampires were real so I never slept with my back to the door for years thinking they'd bite me in my neck whilwt I slept.
Kept the covers over my head for this exact same reason. I figured I would feel it if a vampire tried to remove the blanket or sheet and I could defend myself... no real thought or planning put into how I would defeat a vampire, but at least I'd be awake. A very religious aunt told me vampires don't exist and that it was in fact demons sent from hell that were trying to get me and all children... I was four when this was explained to me. It's one thing to get scared because you saw a movie about a kind of monster and quite another to have an adult you've been told by your parents to respect explain what to her was a real monster and one of which she was convinced actually existed. I was a very light sleeper well into my teens.
Are you sure you aren't a 14th century peasant?
Your username!!! 🤣
Parents told me if I could get salt on a birds tail I'd be able to catch it.
Pretty sure they told me that shit to at least increase the challenge of actually catching birds so I didn't try to bring one in.
Ayy shit, I come from a island hamlet where we catched live hares and sold them off. The islanders often told outsiders that "To catch a hare, one must sneak up behind it and stray some salt on its tail, after which one can simply grab it".
I guess it makes sense to see this joke in the wild, but it never occurred to me that we weren't the only ones using it.
Haha, wow. I was definitely from Arkansas so about as far from an island anyone is living on so yea it's wild to think about how far it's gone.
Santa, Easter bunny, tooth fairy, god, etc
Queen of England
I learned how planes work before cars, so since faster cars always had more exhaust pipes than slower cars I presumed the concept of thrust was similar to a jet engine and had no idea that the wheels themselves were powered until I mentioned it when I was like 6-7.
My grandmother told me that lightning is attracted to hair so I wouldn't go out during storms which I loved.
aww star crossed lovers
Demons are real and they live inside your computer delivering your emails and internet. Before computers they used to screw around with physicists and mathematians and break their theories but now they're too busy to do that anymore.
Not religious in the slightest, my dad just saw me asking what Beastie on his BSD machine's screensaver was and decided to fuck with me when he realised I didn't know what a demon (in any sense of the word) was
Two things: counting using the last "0" number before going on to another decade (ie. ...18,19,10,20...28,29,20,30) and that credit cards have unlimited money lol
That women are attracted to nice guys.
It’s 97% untrue.
Not saying they are attracted to jerks either - in fact my overwhelming impression is that women despise those too (some exceptions exist of course).
Just saying that however equality has come, and should still come, attraction exists at a lower level. And at that level, someone who can hold their own, push their way through and be kind about it, will always attract more women than the “nice guy”.
Before you react - I’ve been together with my wife 17 years, we have four kids and I’m not some kind of player.
Just stating that I was brought up to believe women always prefer nice guys. And in retrospect I can see that I was brought up by a well meaning parents (mother, my dad was in the navy so away a lot) who tried their best to make me “not an asshole”. They succeeded. But I wish my dad at some point had sat me down to tell me a few home truths about how the biology of attraction works.
I thought that cars are only able to drive on the street and was baffled when we saw an offroad rally on the TV
That meritocracy exists.
I thought there was a massive tape inside the radio, that had the radio station on, and that it was big enough that it didn't need to be changed out.
That Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler were the same person.
American propaganda is a hell of a drug. Now they do the same with Putin.
"Putler" springs to mind
I thought the lyrics to Wham's Careless Whisper was "filthy feet and I got no river" for YEARS.
I thought the world didn't entirely suck. Ignorant little idiot, I was.
Just wait. It gets worse.
That's a good one! Do you have any idea how you came to believe that? An offhand comment from a parent?
The human heart is a single-celled organ.
Thanks, The Amazing Colossal Man
The philosophical musings of Vladimir Lenin.
A thousand Lemmygrad users just cried out in pain, and will soon arrive to downvote you.
I used to think America was a democracy and a positive influence on the world.
That it matters who we vote for :-(
Also, that everyone gets a chance to chase their dreams.
And, that everybody finds love eventually.
That there was a deity named god
Technically his name is Yahweh but he gets mad if you call him that so people use the term God as a sign of respect