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.

That adults were intelligent

That the future would be better.

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

Justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing.

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

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.

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 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 dogs were all boys and cats were all girls.

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

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".

That brain surgeons must make like $20 an hour, since that seemed like a huge amount of money to me. Even though that equates to around $80 today, I was a bit off, since even one that made a relatively modest $700k a year would be making roughly $350 hourly.

That big fireworks from far away could somehow land on my family's car and burn us to death. Brought to me by my older sister trying to scare me at the age of 7 🙃

That the moon was moving and following us when we were driving.

That going to the bathroom at a neighbour's house was rude and that I had to hold it in until we got home. I vividly remember this one time I was sitting on my mum's lap. She talked for hours and I couldn't hold it anymore, but I also was embarrassed to tell her I needed to go home, so I ended up urinating on myself. I still didn't tell anyone until my mum felt her legs warm and wet. I still hate using any toilet that isn't mine but I at least do what I need to do now.

Neighbour took me out on a dog walk on a hill and to stop me stepping on rabbit shit she told me that was where baby rabbits came from. Took a few years to untangle that in my brain!

"Benny Hill owns Thames TV, he named it after his Thames van" (pronounced to rhyme with "frames").

Hey op. The food and drink thing isn't fully untrue. Good is a good replacement for sleep, in the short term. It won't last of course, but you can give your bidy additional calories and it can help with the lack of sleep, in the short time. So like hours, not days 

That everyone’s life is rife full of making main character dramatic life or death clenching decisions where you’re going to save someone and have to leave someone else behind (like falling off of a cliff randomly)

It was such a meaningless stress and a way for insecure drama addicted people start some of the stupidest fights out of boredom.

And that most people are deeply concerned about what you think and what you do. Fact is most people don’t even notice you’re alive and way more concerned in their own stuff.

Before a show would start on PBS, A splash screen would pop up and say “brought to you by X”. I foolishly believed it was saying broughtued by and had no idea what it meant for something to be broughtued.