Ask Lemmy

I thought credit/debit cards had infinite money. Not sure how that idea didn't lead to me doing incredibly stupid things.

I somehow also thought my parents got groceries for free because I didn't see them giving physical paper money to the cashier. Or I confusingly also thought they were stealing or something, and the cashier just let them.

I thought hard work would be enough to make a living.

That adults were intelligent

that adults knew what they were doing, and knew the stuff they were so loudly talking about. Was I naive.

Not a belief, but a confusion: I didn't understand how maps with a "you are here" marker knew where you were. 😅

I lived in the greatest country in the world and everyone was so jealous of us.

• Cops are good

• Hard work pays off

• I might own a home someday

• The government isn't out to get anyone

• People are inherently good

• Drugs are bad

That hamburgers were called "handburgers" because you hold them with your hand when you eat.

I thought that fire inheritly pushes things, and that all you needed to do to make a rocket, was to take a sizable flame, like a campfire or something, flip it upside down so that the flame pointed down instead of up somehow, and attach it to the bottom of something.

That the future would be better.

That the world is fair, that here's good and evil, but no shades of grey.

That people in power do it for the good of the people

I thought the ribbon cables inside PCs was where memory was stored. I remember at like age 6 watching my older sister upgrade the RAM of our family computer (a 486 machine I think) and seeing all the mess of ribbon cables in the inside and I assumed that was memory. I guess because it reminded me of the tape inside a cassette?

Justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing.

I got two for ya:

1. When people got injured in movies, such as having a body part chopped off, they found someone who was already missing that body part, surgically reattached a new body part, and then chopped it off for real. Decapitations were played by people on death row.
2. When you flush the toilet at night, a scary clown will come out and get you, unless you quickly run and hide under the covers. In my defense, my uncle thought it was funny to tell this to my sisters and me so that we'd scream and cry and run at night while my parents were trying to sleep.

• If a lawyer's client tells them they did it then the lawyer should just turn them in.
• After watching cars commuting in opposite directions, which seemed pointless to me, I thought everyone should just trade jobs so they live where they work.
• I thought girls had ballsacks without the shaft.
• I thought you could make a car that didn't need gasoline by attaching a magnet to the back and then attaching another magnet with an arm so they repel each other. Imagine my disappointment when I built a prototype and it didn't work.

Until I was about 5, I believed all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.

I believed babies were conceived by kissing. When I first released genitals might be involved, I was in disbelief, thinking something like "No, it cannot be. This would be too stupid. Then it must be kissing that makes you pregnant".

Growing up our backyard neighbors were Buddhists. They had done up their whole yard to be a missive zen garden type deal. Ponds, little rivers between those ponds, a big ol gazebo and sand pit.. lowkey a dream backyard. As a child it was a point of endless curiosity over our talk rotting fence. I would try and sneak peeks when I could but it was an ongoing mystery to me because our yard was muddy and ugly.

When I was young, like >7, sometimes if I did something bad my parents would lift me up and carry me to the fence yelling that they were going to feed me to the budda people.

Naturally, I was fucking terrified of Buddhists. It wasn’t until I was maybe 15 or so when we learned about them in school that I realized Buddhists aren’t actually cannibals.

Tldr Buddhists are cannibals

When I was a kid my parents would show me the NORAD Santa Tracker on Christmas eve, and of course had to explain to me that NORAD tracks everything larger than a baseball in the sky so of course they would track Santa's movements. This easily added a couple of years onto how long I believed in Santa because why the heck would NORAD have a Santa tracker if it wasn't real? The federal government doesn't do whimsy like that!

I think it was the fact that the little animations never changed from year to year that finally allowed me to drop that line of reasoning...

I thought that a bank account is like Scrooge McDuck's lair with piles of money and treasures and every time my parents told me that we can't afford something I just told them to withdraw from their bank account.

I also thought that roundabouts were for when you don't know where you're going so you can drive circles there.

I thought they killed actors for the scene. Someone just needed to be sacrificed, apparently. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

A shame to admit this, but I believed in God until I was 12.

When I was upset about what I saw all around me, I was told that animals don't suffer like we do. They aren't conscious like we are. I knew better, but when everyone is acting as if something is true, you can kind of get drawn up in it, and I guess I believed it for a while. It was a helpful belief to have.

That everyone secretly wants to be a girl.

I'd look at commuters going the opposite way on the road and scoff at them for going the wrong way. Grandma's house is this way you fools, why are you going the other way?

I also thought all TV shows were live and the actors took breaks during the commercials.

I believed dogs were all boys and cats were all girls.

My dad's 4WD had a 'sub fuel' button and he told me it was for submarine mode. The car had a snorkel but the underwater mode was disabled and I believed that shit until an embarrassingly old age.

What an absolute asshole.

When I was a kid I'd get a new stuffed animal, and somewhere on the tag it would say, "Made from all new material".

And for some reason I thought that meant the material had just been developed or discovered. Like they had a team of scientists in a lab working on a new type of polyester just so they could use it to make this shitty stuffed lemon that I won at a church carnival.

Thirty years later I realized it probably just meant the materials weren't recycled.

• I thought all women had balls.
• Testicles act as urine tanks.
• Sex is a procedure done in a hospital, under the supervision of doctors. A couple goes to a hospital to perform sex when they plan on having a baby.
• Penetrative sex involves parting butt cheeks and "dropping the penis in". This was my first wet dream lmfao, where I was "dropping my dick" in a hot friend. Except, the friend was a boy and so was I.
• Thinking I was straight.

(Clearly, I got access to porn quite late, and sex Ed didn't exist at school or home)

I set fire to my house because of a Cartoon Network ad.

At some point there was this animation that Cartoon Network used as an intermission between shows or ads. IIRC it was just stop-motion of some gray clay or play-doh thing that changed shapes, and became various characters from the CN shows, then in the end it transformed into the CN logo, but I was a very young kid so I'm really not sure I remember all the details correctly.

Anyways, one day when I was around 6 or 7 years old an aunt and uncle of mine were visiting, and they were smokers. I had just watched the aforementioned intermission and was wondering how I could get that magical grey mass that transformed into the various CN characters. Everyone else was in the 2nd floor and my uncle was showering, so I looked around the 1st floor trying to find something that I could use to create this magical play-doh.

When I saw my uncle's lighter on top of some cabinet, for some reason my 6 year old brain thought that I could set some styrofoam on fire to get the magical grey mass. The styrofoam box was on a shelf made of wood and straw, so you can probably guess how well that went.

After holding the lighter against the styrofoam I saw that the flame started spreading on its own, so I put the lighter back where I found it and ran upstairs to make sure that nobody had seen what I was doing. After 2 or 3 minutes I walk back downstairs and without even entering the laundry room where I had started the fire I see a ton of smoke in the kitchen. After that I ran back upstairs and told my mother that there was a fire (only after asking her several times if she would get mad at me). The main entrance and the laundry room's back door were blocked by the fire, and the kitchen exit was already being engulfed in smoke, so instead she opened one of the windows in the 1st floor and put me and my younger brother outside through the window.

I don't know what exactly happened after that since I was just scared and running around the house confused, but from what my mother told me my uncle ran out of the shower in a towel and the neighbor noticed that something was wrong as well, so with the help of my mom and aunt they were able to put out the fire with the water hose we had in the backyard. Most houses in Brazil are made with bricks and concrete, but our house had some parts that were still made of wood since they were part of an older house that my parents bought and reformed, but thankfully the fire was mostly contained to the concrete side of the house, with only the laundry room, as well as some of the wooden parts in the kitchen and some wooden doors catching fire.

I saw a commercial in the 70's for Starburst. All of them were the same pattern: Person pops candy into their mouth, next scene is them taking off hang-gliding.

I thought if I ate a Starburst I'd get sent flying off a mountain like the hang gliders. Not in a fun way... eat this candy and you're getting flung to your death off the top of a mountain. (I didn't understand what a hang glider was either)

I believed that there were very tiny human workers in my body that made it run.

God

I used to think the sound of cicadas was the sound of sunlight, because it always seemed louder the brighter it was.