Ask Lemmy

Except for school I never went to any institution as a kid. No nursery, no kindergarten, no after school programs. Both my parents worked part time, so there was always an adult at home. For most my life I felt sorry for the kids who had parents working 9-5 and having to be in institutions and getting institutionalized.

I was well into my 30s before my wife explained to me why I was wrong. She was studying for these kind of pedagogical jobs, and while following her education on the side line, it really turned on a light bulb in my head: I was wrong.

While the home-raised method might have worked decently when I was a kid when more people did it, it would absolutely not work today. Most of my own issues throughout childhood and later basically also comes from not socializing enough as a kid. My own kids have been through the whole institution process because both my wife and I have had 9-5 jobs. Due to this, my kids are much better developed to tackle the world that they live in, and they have not lost any off the ability to think freely or anything that I previously believed was the negative effects of being raised in institutions. Of course there are some institutions that are better than others, but overall, their personel are a lot better educated to handle it than someone who has no education on this and only believes in "what was good enough for me..."

Even today, I sometimes meet people who want to home school their kids and such. While that might be a good idea in certain cases, it's almost always done for the wrong reasons and without regard to how difficult it actually is if you want the best for your kid.

Being Mormon.

They always told us that people who gave us anti-mormon literature just made stuff up and it was Satan's way of tempting us. They said to never take any anti-mormon literature and if someone did give it to you then to throw it away without reading.

But at the same time they taught us that the Mormon church was the true church. And they also taught us truth was absolute. Well, i figured if truth is absolute, and if the church was THE true church then it would be able to withstand any criticism. So i read anti mormon literature, like the CES letter. From there i did my own research about various things and found that the Mormon church made up a lot of stuff and did lots of gaslighting.

There was some specific issues that i also had been struggling with, like their treatment of women, gays, and black men/women. That also helped push me to want to make sure if the Mormon church was really true. And it wasn't. Now i can love my friends unconditionally.

I used to be kind of low level anti-pharmaceuticals. Nothing too dramatic (never antivax), but definitely quietly on the side of other forms of interventions of any kind being preferable over drugs.

I still acknowledge that in many instances other interventions can be better, but in a lot of cases a pharmaceutical intervention is the quickest, most effective and safest way for people to deal with whatever health or mental health conditions they have. And also lots of drugs are perfectly safe over the long term.

I think I was raised with a lot of ideas around purity, but when I came out as trans is when that started to change in a big way.

You don't actually smell burnt toast when having a stroke.

Joked about it to my roommate who was in med school once that "I might be having a stroke, or someone burnt their toast again." To which he responded "WTH are you talking about?"

So I explained the meme and he debunked it for me right there haha

Thinking the words, "just calm down" in the heat of an argument with my wife will actually work if I just try it enough times. Mathematically it should but it seems math doesn't care about that.

I thought I'd live a comfortable stable life pursuing the sciences for the sake of knowledge. I learned in the past year or two through studying political economy and climate science that this is pretty unlikely. These days idk what to do. I want to do something more useful, I want to help people but it all feels quite hopeless. It often feels like revolution is the only option but I fear it may even be too late for that. We are already past the point where hundreds of millions will die and be displaced. We are already past the point of inevitable severe famine and societal collapse in many places. We aren't even accomplishing damage control and it feels like most people don't even dare acknowledge it.

Marshmellow is not correct. It's marshmallow. I learned by spell checker. Only took nearly 21 years.

I was wrong about who I was for several years. A pretty unexpectedly intense DMT trip set me right

EDIT: This isn't really the ideal place to elaborate on my experience, but thanks for the interest.

Rinsing after brushing teeth. The fluoride in the toothpaste should stay on your teeth for a while to be effective. So you should floss, then brush, and wait to rinse or not rinse

Alanis Morisette is not the artist that did the "I'm a bitch I'm a lover" song. Meredith Brooks is the artist.
I found out because I had the song stuck in my head and I looked it up on yt. The comments section showed me that I wasn't the only one who thought the song was by Alanis Morisette
Llllink

Cocoa has an "a" at the end of it. I was in college and was like, "haha, they spelled it weird." Nope, just a dumbass.

A BLT is literally just bacon, lettuce, and tomato. I thought it was just the toppings on the base meat (like how a pepperoni pizza inculdes bread, sauce, etc.). I don't like bacon or raw tomato, so I never had one.

There is no bone in the penis. I swore there was one until I made it to 3D molding and, as we were going over different body parts and their movement, I asked my male friend "Hey, where's the penis bone/muscle." He looked at me like I had two heads. I assumed it could do tricks, like waving and stuff. 🤷🏿‍♀️

Until I was 24 or 25 I believed that women were disinterested in sex, and that sexual relationships were wholly transactional. I also thought I was hidiously undatable.

Nope. Wrong on all counts.

I thought the "purple" skittles were supposed to be brown (I still think they look brown). One day I looked on the package. The rest is history.

As a kid I would hear “save big money” and would often show a person next to oversized money (like cartoon people next to giant dollars and coins).

I was absolutely under the impression it meant large scale money and found it confusing anyone would want that. It would be so inconvenient!

I’m not sure when I figured it out but it wasn’t an “a-ha!” moment, it just sort of gradually fell out of my brainmeat.

I thought that the human body was incapable of making glucose. Learned about gluconeogenesis during a university nutrition course

only ever read the word cyan and eventually learned I'd been pronouncing it wrong my whole life when i said it out loud in conversation

Raised conservative christian, took a disgustingly long time to lose some of my shittier takes

That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, "If you play too many video games, they'll melt your brain like your dad" or "why would anyone pay you that much" when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn't normal and I didn't have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.

I haven't spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.

For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who's good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.

There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.

As a non American who has never been to the US, but grew up well within its sphere of cultural influence.

I thought that about half of the population was black, maybe 40% minimum. I was surprised to learn that it was just above 10% in reality.