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

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. 😅

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.

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?

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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

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

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

That adults were intelligent

God

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

That truth and justice will always eventually prevail

1 Foreign countries are rich af because they can afford to eat food that cost 10,000 currency

It was just the Korean Won lmfao, that's when I learned about the existence of other currencies, it was first time I stepped foot outside of China, I was 8.

2 You can just magically get money from checks, so why not write a bigger number?

Then my dad told me about bank accounts and you need real money for the check to work.

So no infinite money glitch sadly :/

Personal checks didn't exist in China btw.

3 My mom put me in an afterschool program without telling me. I thought I got in trouble and was being punished, since I barely understood English words. I cried for like the hour duration of the afterschool program.

For context: In China, being held afterschool is a punishment if you didn't memorize the story/poem that you were required to memorize.

4 Santa. Tbf I caught my parents pretending to be santa and leaving me a gift, I was half awake and saw them, but thought santa still existed, just didn't visit me. Then at one party, I noticed "Santa" looked suspiciously similar to an uncle, who was no where to be seen. Also sounded exactly like the unclem

Then I eventually realized religions was just bullshit too.

5 I thought babies were conceived from kissing. Like maybe like you also had to sleep in the same bed then the souls of the couple bind and that somehow allows another soul to reincarnate into the womb of a woman.

Then I was like: what if mom kissed dad, do I have another sibling that'll take the attention away from me?

Nope, later my mom told me she got forcibly sterilized by the goverment, no need to afraid of a little sibling.

And also I overheard classmates talking about porn lol and then I learned human anatomy

6 "Tell me the truth, son, I promise I won't get mad"

That was a lie

Loading Screen Tips: Don't trust your parents, it's your closest blood-related liars

7 "Police are good" -nope

I remember those Hong Kong Drama shows... it's always cops vs "bad guys", the cops were always portrayed as good, and if its bad, its just a corrupt cop working for the criminals, then the "good cops" will find out and arrest the bad one.

Reality is they never investigate crimes you report, because who would spend their time catching a thief when they could just enjoy donuts and coffee.

Unless they get bored and wanna ruin innocent lives. Then they'll harass you.

ACAB

• 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)

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 wasn’t sure why “youth in Asia” was such a popular topic.

::: spoiler

People were talking about euthanasia.

:::

When I was in 3rd grade, my older siblings conspired to manipulate me into thinking our bathroom mirror was haunted, and that the ghost could travel to other mirrors, so for a few weeks I was terrified to go the bathroom.

Then one day it hit me that I hadn't seen anything and I challenged the ghost, which of course, did not make an appearance.

Learned an important lesson that day about "faith", trusting people, and how silly it is to believe in things when you have no practical reason to do so.

Definitely stupid on my part.

I thought the world was physically black and white in the days when pictures were in black and white, and that colour was somehow exclusive to the present and immediate past.

That the future would be better.

There was a TV show in the UK called Crimestoppers, where they would show reenactments of crimes to try to find witnesses. I used to wonder why they didn't just arrest the criminals while they were filming.

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

That my parents didn't have parents. I knew my grandparents well, I just never connected the dots.

I thought baby birds shot rabies out of their mouths, so I would never stand in front of one.

Your first two thoughts used to be correct. Movies were put together and released within the same year. In fact many of those Hallmark Channel style holiday movies are shot in the spring/summer for a fall/winter release. During the early days of television, all TV was live and set were reset during those commercial breaks.

My dumb ass thought people actually believed Jesus' teachings.

9/11 happened and 10 year old me was running around going, "Well, now obviously is the perfect time to turn the other cheek, be good to those who hurt us, and forgive not just seven times, but seven times seven times."

Strangely, all the people who had taught me those things didn't hear the words I spoke but apparently heard something along the lines of, "Allahu akbar, America deserved 9/11, death to America, Bin Laden did nothing wrong, and I'm happy about dead firefighters." They extremely did not like me trying to apply what they had taught me in that context.

I think I must be autistic or something because it seems like everybody else picked up on some sort of subtle understanding that none of that stuff was meant to be taken seriously or applied to real life, and I'm just over here like an absolute dupe who didn't pick up on the joke.

That all people are equal in the eyes of the law/justice

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.

That everyone secretly wants to be a girl.

I always thought I hear something when sleeping as a kid. A earry sound. Gaslighted myself into believing I imagining things. Slept in my old room over the holidays now for the first time in over a decade. You can hear the pipes / radiator. Loudly..

Justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing.

That, if you ask a lighthearted question meant to provoke answers of silliness that are relatable and make us feel connected, people will refrain from using it as a way to display their trauma and politics.

I'd get an easy job going into I.T.

And that I was a genius for designing a solar powered lamp that shone on itself

When I was very young I thought Jesus was born every year just to die again at Easter constantly, and Christmas was His resurrection. I remember seeing Venus near Christmas and thinking that it was announcing Jesus' birth.

Also if a building was destroyed while you were inside, everything would be fine until you tried to leave and you'd see it was a wreck

You earned money by buying things. That's what change was.

Nighttime is caused by heavy clouds. Stars are just gaps in the clouds. I remember trying to test this theory the first time I flew at night, but I passed out from exhaustion.

When I first heard about daylight saving time, I thought someone was capturing daylight in jars to release in the winter

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 fell for that old manufactured myth about the average anount of spiders swallowed per year which was designed to show how easily misinformation spreads.

I remember when I first started playing Oregon Trail I thought dysentery was pronounced Dynasty.

I do that with a lot of words actually.

I actually thought that when I got sleepy or tired, I just needed to drink or eat something. Not realizing that it wouldn't have mattered.

Wouldn’t it?

There are many biological and neurological reasons on why we can feel fatigue/tired. consuming definitely affects it in a meaningful way.

I would point at all the caffeinated stuff that exists but even a piece of fruit can grant you a short buff.

Eventually you will require sleep but science is still trying to understand why exactly that is.

God

That infinity was blue because the sky was blue and the sky was infinite (a teacher told me this one)

I would hold things up to the landline phone in an attempt to show my grandparents things.

Funnily enough, the future came full circle.

I thought that there had been historically a boxing match the day after Christmas, and while the name remains, the actual barbaric spectacle went the way of bear-baiting due to people becoming more averse to violence.

that if I had sex before I was 18 that I would be sent to jail

That my parents loved me.

The US is a liberal democracy dedicated to universal principles of personal freedom and civil justice.

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

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

I believed that one day I would find myself in a situation where I would have to save myself or a friend from being buried in quicksand.

i read about black holes in an encyclopedia and how nothing can escape from them when getting too close and thought that they're a real threat to me in daily life. i'd look around when i was outside making sure that i'm not getting close to any so that i don't get sucked in. i must have been very good at avoiding them since i never saw one.

the same encyclopedia had a part about human reproduction and showed an illustration of sexual penetration. i thought it looked uncomfortable and wondered why anyone would want to do any of that, and seeing how many people have kids i came to a conclusion that people do it because it's mandatory and you are required to do it. i was very much not looking forward to the day it's my turn to have sex, until i realized that you simply just don't have to.

in kindergarten my mom was talking with the caretaker about a "life-booster" that "wakes her right up". i interpreted it as it making her wake up because she's terrified by it. for a week i was living in dread, thinking that this "life-booster" was some kind of malevolent entity that wants to kill me, who might be nearby and watching me. i imagined it as some kind of evil goblin and i checked my room thoroughly every evening to make sure he's not hiding anywhere so that i'll survive the night. after a week i realized that they were talking about coffee and that's the thing that people drink to be more awake and that it makes no sense that there'd be a monster out there that's looking specifically for me.

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

I thought there was a list of rules for social interactions that I could and would eventually learn, and then I would not be confused all the time, made fun of, ignored, and blamed for all communication failures.

We lived by a tiny sea bay, I thought that the place on the other side (despite having been there!) of the water was Sweden.

That things would get better with time.

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.

Strawberry milk came from pink cows and chocolate milk came from brown cows. My parents lied to me.

Basically, karma

That the idion "Teach a man to fish" was biblical

I thought people liked me. lol

How naive!

If you graduate from college, you will find a job that sustains you.

They were called "prentzels" not "pretzels".

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)

That America was a good neighbour. They are not, they are my enemy.

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.

I thoughr babies were literally made by kissing.

When I was pretty young I got in the habit of watching the evening news with my parents. For some reason I got it in my head that when the news talked about illegal aliens that they were talking about aliens from outer space. It was embarrassing how long I believed that until my mom explained illegal aliens to me. My kid brain just couldn't cope with calling obvious human beings aliens.

I though people in the 1920/30(???) and before were black and white, because films of that era were. Only over time the world became coloured, and at first the colors were kinda washed out and sepia-like, like old film and photos. Only recently had the world turned into brilliant saturated colours. Yay!

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!

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

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

1. School made me greatly underestimate the need in menial or just boring labor and that everyone could've found the interesting kind of job if they just pushed hard enough, applied for these.
2. Ah, and that works is like school, is mandated and has a predictable end and then you forever free.
3. I thought robots, computers and programs have some kind of their own inteligence, just directed by their creators, rather than the one that is directly coded in.
4. I didn't thought pet owners and pets have completely different lifespans, e.g. dogs, hamsters, turtles aren't aging with their humans 1:1, for what is the point of taking an animal that won't follow you all the way?
5. That spawning a baby is an instant process with no cooldown, consequitive labor/responsibilities, and popping another one is just a matter of parents' preferencies.

That Vitamin C evaporated from orange juice if you didn't drink it in the first 5 minutes. Still believed it until 2 months ago :')

That "grown folks business" was anything other than gossip

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 looks didn't matter, only people's character.

My mom once told me "if you work a lot, you can be rich" I actually believed that as a very young child.

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

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.

That if we put up enough efforts, we'll achieve world peace? I held this stupid belief till high school.

That adults are trustable, and will honour their words? This died young.

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.

The toothfairy, santa, ghosts, god, the devil, the jolting during shifting of a manual transmission car was the body catching up to the wheels, meat was the nutritious part of a pizza and the veggies were useless.

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.

1. That movie/TV actors would put on some kind of rubber/latex masks on to get into roles, i.e. I didn't think that most of the time they look like how they look like in everyday life. I'm not talking about makeup to age someone or turn them into a non-human character.

2. For a short period of time I would think that the news anchor on TV could see me at the same time I was looking at the screen - so I was very cautious as I was passing out of the shower and through the living room still in my bathrobe.

3. That there was a god, and if you pray really hard, your wish would come true. That was an idea from a friend - I kind of knew she didn't really believe in it either and was just repeating something heard earlier, but I figured it was worth a shot. Needless to say I quickly saw through the crap.

When I learned food and drinks were energy for your body, I actually thought that when I got sleepy or tired, I just needed to drink or eat something. Not realizing that it wouldn't have mattered.

I mean, that does work sometimes, when your body is lacking in carbs or protein rather than sleep, it can make you tired as to conserve energy you don't have, not knowing we have apps for ordering pizza to practically anywhere on Earth.

So that wasn't wrong per se, more just a tad to simple.

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.

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 US'ians are cool people and a role model for how the world should be, boy was I (well, my dad) wrong.

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".