Things you used to think

[Ken]

I guess this was very progressive of me for the time, but when I was young I didn't even realize that there were different races of people, I just thought everyone looked different from each other just simply because they did. I thought having dark skin was no different than having a beard or something.
I wish kids still thought like that today but now they're exposed to too much questionable content too early.

I still believe that and wished everyone believed that way.

 

[Wolfnox]

That people were nice and friendly.

 

[Judge]

How as a teenager I used to relate to both appointed and elected officials

 

[Neonatal RRT]

Things I know now:

1. "There are very few empirical truths, "rights and wrongs", or "black and white" situations. There's almost always more information that need be considered."

What I now know that, in most cases, a "truth" is subject to the context and perspective of the beholder and situation. There are as many subjective truths as there are perspectives and contexts. What science makes some attempt to demonstrate, over time, is running an experiment though many perspectives and contexts in order to understand a broader truth, often via statistical meta analysis. This is why scientific truths, such as medical practice, change over time, and hopefully, will continue to do so. Personal truths and cognitive biases are not "facts", but rather a result of a unique set of circumstances (your life) that may or may not apply in a more broader sense, and why personal opinion is the lowest form of evidence.

In day-to-day interactions with people I must remind myself to: (1) Give people some "grace" and "listen" to their perspective and context, whilst understanding that their unique experience (their life) may or may not be representative of a broader truth, and (2) Understand that I must not allow my ego get the better of me and allow emotions enter the interaction. Exchanging thoughts and ideas do not have to result in a "win" or "loss" for anyone.

If any of you have gotten into a discussion with me, and we've been bantering back and forth, know that this is where my mind is at. Do not interpret a discussion as an "argument" per se, but more of an attempt to seek out a broader truth. On the other hand, I don't ever want to be seen as a hypocrite, so you do have permission to call me out on my BS if I appear to be allowing my ego or emotions get the better of me.

Cheers

 

[Nervous Rex]

I used to think that any time I was called out for being different - whether I was being yelled at or just casually questioned - it was because I was being “bad”.

Times when the teacher would tell me, “Everyone else is doing it this way. Why are you doing it that way?” - I thought it must be because I was bad. I learned later that there is immense social pressure on everyone to fit in, to all do things the same way, but there’s no logical reason behind it - there’s just conformity for the sake of conformity.

If my mom rolled her eyes in frustration at me or told me to stop doing something - it must be because I was bad. No, I’m turns out that I was just a handful and my mom didn’t always have the energy to deal with me.

I worked hard at stopping all “bad” behaviors, so people wouldn’t call me out or yell at me any more, but it’s hard when you don’t know why something is bad.

One of the biggest healing experiences for me has been seeing my children repeat a few of my childhood behaviors and me - seeing it from ab adult perspective- realizing that the behavior is harmless.

It’s taken me a long time to reframe so many memories so that I don’t think of myself as bad in them. Curious, socially naive, and energetic - but not bad.

 

[MildredHubble]

About the age of 7, I discovered the sound from a radio came from the paper cone of it's speaker. I reasoned that all the speaker needed was some electricity to play. I didn't understand the significance of all the other parts in the radio was, but still thought I would test my hypothesis.

I scavenged a speaker out of a discarded radio. Then cut the end off of an extension cord, stripped the wire ends and wrapped them around the terminals of the speaker. Upon plugging the cord end into a wall outlet, the speaker exploded, blasting the voice coil across the room, through the door and out into the hallway. I was totally astounded in wonderment as to how and why it did that. That was the beginning of my electronics design obsession and career.

My mom, very sternly, forbade me from ever playing with anything electrical again. Yea... that didn't work.

Ok, it's a good job we didn't know eachother as kids! The worst thing I think I did was magnetise the colour TV, also with a speaker cone. Well, there was that time where I plugged the drill in and activated it when I was maybe 2 years old!

 

[MildredHubble]

When I was very young, the local kids used to say "If you killed a worm, it makes it rain." So I was always super careful not to harm any worms if I was digging in the garden.

One day one of the nasty bully kids gleefully stamped on a poor worm that had been bathing in a puddle. I had a total meltdown, mostly because I felt sorry for the worm and partially because I didn't want it to rain. My dad was very confused to see me kneeling down sobbing over a dead worm.

I still never harm spiders or little critters, even though I'm quite phobic around spiders particularly. I will always carefully remove them and put them safely outside. Or do my best to ignore them lol!

 

[Ken]

I still never harm spiders or little critters, even though I'm quite phobic around spiders particularly. I will always carefully remove them and put them safely outside. Or do my best to ignore them lol!

I have never been able to tolerate anything being killed. I have always considered it murder, regardless of the reason for the killing. As a child, all my best friends were not of the human species. I had wildlife friends as well as livestock friends. They were my very best friends. They understood me and I understood them. To this day, I still have an extreme PTSD from the murder of my livestock friends. It was a tragic shock to learn what "livestock" meant. That was when I was about 8 years old. I loved to sit for hours in a giant red harvester ant bed in amazement watching how they communicate and cooperatively work together. They even work in organized teams. That ant bed was huge and had been there for years. No, I never got stung. They was never aggressive to me.

 

[GrownupGirl]

I used to think I would become a real cartoonist or an animator instead of a giant loser.

 

[Shevek]

I thought that the world was so strange that nobody would lie to make it even more confusing.
I thought that when people disagreed, it could be traced to either data or processing errors.
I thought that socially adept people must be smart, and just kidding about troubles with math.
I thought my family was normal.
I thought that people would take peak oil seriously, to provide a career for me.

 

[Misty Avich]

When kids borrowed books from the school library the librarian would stamp the date the book is due to be returned, into the inside cover of the book. I used to wonder how they had a stamp for every date of the century lol. Then I learnt that they just had stamps with numbers 0-9 and stamps with each month of the year. Duh! Lol

 

[Nervous Rex]

When I was around or 6, my mom was watching a Godzilla movie. I must have said something about the size of the monster because she explained that it's a guy in a suit and they use "a special material" to make him look big. She didn't explain anything about model cities, superimposing images, etc,

I thought "special material" meant a type of fabric or cloth that would make you look giant in real life. I couldn't figure out how it worked, but I wanted to get some of it.

 

[Nervous Rex]

I read a lot of very simple science-for-kids type books at an early age - ones that offer over-simplified explanations that raise more questions than they answer. One said that everything is made atoms. Another said that everything living is made of cells. Yet another book said that molecules make up everything around us. I was so confused, thinking, "Well, which is it?". I asked my step mother and she didn't have any answer.

I had to wait a few years until I read something or learned something at school that clarified that molecules are made of atoms, cells are made of molecules, and cells are part of living things. I declared to my parents that I had figured it out and recited the hierarchy. I can't remember what their reply was, but it was so casual and dismissive that I was extremely disappointed. I had finally found the answer to something that had bugged me for a few years and all they could say was basically "huh."

 

[DuckRabbit]

I have a male cousin a few years older than me, and when he turned 7, I thought that was an age only boys could be.

It 'sounded' like a boys' age - a bit like some sort of synesthesia.

 

[DuckRabbit]

It took me a long time to realise that each church had its own denomination. I thought churches were just churches - interchangeable; I didn't know some were for this group of people and others were for that group.

 

[Shevek]

When I learned that boys could be drafted to fight in wars, I had no doubt that the companies supplying my equipment would be under government control, with ownership control and profits temporarily suspended. Think how different things would be if there was no money to be made on a war, only various losses.