Ask Lemmy

We found a dead baby bird. Was told most animal babies don't live to adulthood. Knew people were animals so it was likely me and most of my friends would be dead by 21

Thay someday I would be free from the social trappings that invade our personal lives.

When I was young and hanging with my great aunt's church friends, we were walking to the store. I went to link arms with my great aunt and her friend was like, "Hey, that's dangerous. You can't defend yourself. Someone could jump you." From that point, I assumed that anyone who was linking arms was, like, giving a show of dominance. Like, "Yeah, we're linked up, because we can still take anybody even with only one arm." Didn't change that mindset until I was in middle school after I tried to explain to my friend how dangerous walking with her boyfriend was because "how would they defend themselves." 🙃

I used to think "change" you got from a store was just the business being nice and making sure you didn't walk away without any money.

I thought that if you swallowed your gum, it would stay in your stomach forever, so you had to make sure to never do it because eventually there would be no room for food anymore.

Also, old CRT TVs had this static electricity sort of fuzzy feeling on the screen, and if you ran your hand over it, it would dissipate. I thought that by doing that, you were absorbing the TVs power and if you did it too much, it would eventually stop working.

Lastly, I believed with all my heart that all the pets you ever owned were waiting for you in heaven and it made me mad when my (very devout Catholic) grandma told me that pets and animals don't have souls and so they didn't go to heaven. I said if that was true then I didn't want to go to heaven! I'm atheist now, so I don't even believe that anyone goes to heaven, but if anyone deserves to go, it's all the kitties, puppies, and various rodentia I've loved in my life.

That I could dig to China

I used to think that the whole world was in black and white, just like all the old pictures and movies I had seen, then at some point we discovered color and turned it on! After that there were no more black and white pictures and movies anymore.

I believed that you'd only get a finite amount of words in your life. So I didn't speak much and I would think that the annoying kids in school that always were talking through the teacher's explanation, would get their punishment later in life when they'd go mute because they would have used up all their words.

Hiccups mean your growing.

Thanks parents.

For a long time, i thought that people thinking that the pyramids were made by aliens was a joke and that the number of people who truly believed it was 0

That Pluto is a planet.

Traffic lights were hand operated.
The small town where I grew up had one pedestrian traffic light for crossing the main road. There was a small brick shed next to that traffic light with no windows and a little door. When I was little I was convinced that was an operation's center where someone worked to turn the lights red or green.
In reality it was a power substation for the neighborhood, but I was seriously convinced that behind that door was a man looking at a TV screen and operating the traffic light at the right moment.
When we went to a larger town nearby, where there were traffic lights without a convenient mysterious building nearby, I told myself that the traffic light people were most likely working under ground, peeping through the drains.

I.. was good at making up answers for myself instead of just asking my parents.

My mom told me that Dad went to work to make money, and I actually expected to see money making machines when I visited him at the office.

I used to think the poles holding up traffic lights were hollow, and there was a person sitting inside throwing switches to change the lights while looking at a watch to keep the timing fair.

That the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the only one I knew!

That our blood was blue, but turned red when exposed to air and light. All because a teacher told us so.

That Africa was largely unexplored by humans and mostly unpopulated

Oh yeah I had a few.

• That the moon you see during daytime is actually Mars (I then repeated that to my big sister and she believed it for an embarrassingly long amount of time)
• That the "up" arrows on traffic lights were for planes

That Everyone the Police arrest is a bad person.

That all large salty bodies of water were called "the mediterranean sea."

That my grandma's name was "grandma".

That Europe is a separate country where all the politicians live

That my parents never had parents. Sure, I had grandparents and saw them daily, but I somehow never realized that they were my dad's parents.