I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth's crust, mantle and core.

Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.

Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades. Fast forward to me now explaining to people on reddit what lava is, that it's actually molten rock... there are a lot of people who have never thought about it, saw pictures of volcanoes and just accepted that they spit out "hot goo" and never thought deeper.

I wish I was kidding, but also... I wonder if it's a simpler, more peaceful life when you don't know how anything works. I was up at 2:00 AM with my brain whirring away, like every night.

Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.

When I learned about germs, how they're everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surface, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.

A single atom wouldn't even be worse than, like, a pop rock anyway. You need a whole mess of them motherfuckers to make a big boom.

Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10...it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake...

When I was in kindergarten they showed us a cartoon with anthropomorphic teeth to try to encourage dental hygiene and those teeth scared me so much that I refused to brush my teeth for years and I ended up getting gum disease because of it.

NOO BILLL

WHYYY

EVAPORATES INTO ASH

New anxiety just dropped.

I remember being told "Atoms are always moving", so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would "move out of the way."

I also just read my husband this meme and he was like "Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts."

When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn't want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.

Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn't that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn't last very long either, maybe a couple of months.

Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.

Yep was super paranoid and anxious over misunderstandings now just super paranoid and anxious over worst case unlikely scenarios.

If you did manage to do this by random chance would you even notice? A single atom is pretty small. If you somehow split a random carbon atom in lettuce wouldn't you get less than a Joule as long as it doesn't somehow chain?

Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcgRGo4wj2w

I guess there are two kinds of people because when I learned that splitting atoms causes a nuclear explosion, I got a craft knife and some sand from the garden and went to town on them trying to slice some atoms just right 👌

Reminds me of The Flintstones Split the Atom

I mean... The chance of that happening is incredibly low, but... It's not zero.

Have fun stressing out of cutting things. Any cut you make can be the one low chance cut when you accidentally split an atom. :)

If I'm to believe that second person didn't misspeak, they had "mental breakdowns" with an "s", so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.

They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.

Sometimes all kids need is a scientifically literate adult to explain precisely why their fear isn't possible.