I thought I was smart. I’m not. I’m clever and good at figuring things out, but there is a difference.
I call myself smart enough to know I’m not.
I know that I know nothing, said Socrates thousands of years ago. So I’d say it’s beyond clever to teach yourself things and learn from your experiences. That is very smart in my book.
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.
A large majority of that is winning the luck lottery of which family you were born into. Most people who have “trouble staying afloat” are also those who are economically disadvantaged… as in, in the lower-90% of the economic population who are desperately just treading water. Most of the people who “breeze through life” have the intergenerational family wealth that permits this behaviour.
Yes, that has also been my experience. But this also evens out fairly well with age. I’ve come across very well put together people in their 50s and 60s whose childhood all the way through late adulthood has been literal hell. But this might be survivorship bias.
For me it was that other people think in the same manner, basically. But it turns out that brain usage is very different for people. So some people use more of their visual cortex for maths, making them see color in numbers.
In this video Richard Feynman explains it better then I could.
Feynman explains most things better than most people can.
This video was really interesting! Thanks!
Yeah that’s his talent, such an amazing man. If you haven’t, read his biographie.
The video is part of a longer series ‘fun to imagine’ is really with it watching them all.
So you’re telling me we can’t just steal a baby from one of those secluded amazon tribes and force them to learn the quadratic formula so I don’t have to? there go my weekend plans :(
That if you weren’t part of “our” religion (my family’s religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are
It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That’s how my parents brought me up, for which I’m still very grateful to them today. It’s good to hear that you’ve found your own path, which certainly wasn’t easy. Respect, my friend.
Three of my cousins are sisters in the same family. All three are vegans, just one of them militant.
While we enjoy the two happy vegans and their great families and their joy at sharing their chosen lifestyle, we get no judgement from them; unlike the militant sister who reminds us we’re all going to a kind of hell on earth of our own making and we deserve to be sick for eating creature-flesh, etc.
Your comment reminds me that beliefs other than religious can be used by over-eager proselytists to judge and belittle people. And yeah, she’s so off my friends list.
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.
Good for you because morning Mormons are batshit.
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.
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.
Some parents forget to support your goals when it’s not in-line with their goals for you; despite probably having the same childhood.
Always be looking for the opportunity to forgive them if it should appear. Not before, but be ready in case they clue-in.
Not sure if forgiveness is the way to go. At least, I think that forgiveness is important but I think there needs to be some understanding and respect from the parent towards their child too. Without that, forgiveness just puts the child in an unnecessarily vulnerable position.
My advice is to try therapy, if you want to get back in touch with your parents at all
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
If you’re talking about the Heritage Minutes ad about Dr. Penfield, she had epilepsy, it wasn’t a stroke. Smelling burnt toast was a precursor to her seizures.
But phosgene does smell like freshly cut grass. “Phosgene smells green!”, kids.
There’s also a scene in Saving Private Ryan where a dying soldier talks about smelling the bread from back home.
Raised conservative christian, took a disgustingly long time to lose some of my shittier takes
I recently saw a shirt for sale online that says, “I’m sorry for everything I said when I was evangelical,” and that really just about sums it up.
Don’t beat yourself up. Seriously.
I was able to break free early partly due to how absurd the hypocrisy became. My mother was going to hell, not because she’s a cold narcissist, but a Jew and a ‘practitioner’ of new age bullshit. And my father saw nothing at all wrong with this type of belief.
Not to mention he was pretty racist (though in a ‘subtle’ way), while helping raise my adopted Korean sister.
I was lucky that he and my mother were such atrociously bad examples of how to deal with others, that I vowed to never be like them.
Same. Lost a very good friend because I was too slow to change, lost my family because I did.
I’m sorry friend 🫂
I didn’t figure my way out until I was in my 30s. Been out of it for over a decade.
I was brainwashed, my head was full of carefully crafted indoctrination. My extended family will almost certainly never be free of it.
We were subjected to an evil process from an early age. It’s not our fault. Losing the hate and guilt is also a process. Go easy on yourself. Takes a tough person to change their entire worldview. Only a few of us make it out.
Opening bananas.
Watch a nature documentary showing me a monkey knew better.
Using my thumbnail on the long thin end and no over-ripe bananas I never had problems with peeling.
Ut… They’re the pros. Trust the pros, man. ;-)
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.
Yes, I’m still learning that. Also giving emotional support instead of trying to fix everything instantly is difficult.
My gorgeous wife’s ginger hair and flashing green eyes warned me off that tactic early on. And I’m alive to tell the tale.
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.
They tend to be concentrated in a few areas. There was one place I lived where none of the dudes living there had ever even seen a white dude in person other than cops and social workers.
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.
It often feels like revolution is the only option
Well, first of all, that’s never gonna happen.
But more importantly, the boring shit is working. China’s greenhouse gas emissions probably peaked this year. The US peaked ages ago. The world isn’t far behind china. Taxes on fossil fuels and investments in renewables will see us through this. By 2026 at the latest, every year will see decreasing global emissions.
Well I’m afraid to say there were a couple revolutions. Maybe you need to check your history book.
Username checks out
Just go into a high paying field, and move somewhere that won’t be affected as badly. The apocalypse is BYOB, so start prepping.
If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.
You are vastly underestimating what will happen if we allow things to continue as they are. We are already at the point of severe famine and 100’s of millions dying and global emissions have continued to increase at essentially the same rate as before every year. Every day that we do nothing the list of dead grows longer. If I were to do nothing but watch then I would consider myself complicit. I think the worst part is that we all know exactly who is responsible but still somehow do nothing about it. I’m genuinely honestly shocked that we don’t see them all as the mass murderers they are. This cannot be a sane world.
Despite this, I do appreciate the condolences.
No, we are not past that point. Stuff can happen fast. Christianity becoming a world religion after being some strange hippy cult for few generations, the collapse of communist eastern europe without a war, noone saw that coming. I agree it looks grim and I’m not optimistic, but I refuse to give up just a few years after grasping global warming. It is not too late and becoming a doomer is not helping.
Used to think that cis people normally think that they are girls or dislike their genitals, and that it was a phase I would grow out of. I didn’t, it just got worse and it was from browsing r/egg_irl and r/traa that made me realize that I was wrong and in-denial.
Glad you found the perspective you needed
I thought lizards lived everywhere, and didn’t know until I was 18 that Oregon was on the west coast of the US, I thought California ended where Washington started and that Oregon was inland (we did not have geography in school).
When I finally went to college as an adult I took a world geography class as an elective because I felt so incredibly ignorant. Now, even years later I can help my kids with geography, quite a bit of it actually stuck.
I’ve always lived in Oregon. You would be surprised how many people think it’s only California and Washington on the west coast. About a dozen different people in various MMOs have had the same confusion.
I learned that the lowest point in Canada is a hair farther south than the most northern part of California
And that 50% of Canada lives below the 49th parallel
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.
Care to elaborate?
They’ve remembered they are DB Cooper
I knew it!
Details?
