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!
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 :(
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.
Ever done a color blindness test?
Funny you say that, I’m actually a tetrachromat, which means I’m the opposite of colorblind. The purple skittles just didn’t seem purple. They chose such a drab shade of purple that, even to me (or even especially to me), rather than being recognizable as the same vibrant color as grapes, it appears to be the kind of purple you get from the sky on an exceptionally rainy droopy day.
It also helped that, after looking at such a drab sky, I ended up seeing the rainbow, thinking back to the skittles commercial, seeing what colors were actually in the rainbow, and thinking “wait a minute…”
it’s not a you problem. different individuals see colour differently. artists may perceive colours differently due to practice in colour theory, lighting, and perhaps paint mixing. people from different cultures may categorize one colour into different groups. what people see as hot pink, programmers may see as magenta or simply just #FF00FF.
TIL Tetrachromacy exists in humans.
It’s actually the same exact gene as the colorblindness gene, except it manifests as tetrachromacy in females while manifesting as colorblindness in males. If you have any colorblind people in your family, chances are you also have tetrachromats in your family too.
It’s a rather double-edged sword, especially as an artist. For example, you lose a little of your natural appreciation of differing shades, and it doesn’t transfer over to technology, so a picture of a bird you see on a device is going to have less color than the same bird if it were right in front of you. Personally I could do without the extra colors.
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’m in my 40’s and I still vacillate on this. :)
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 Menard’s slogan was “save big bunny at Menard’s”.
The first time I went to one was around Easter, so they had bunny-themed stuff around. And the store’s speakers were shit, so it was hard to understand the ad spots playing over them.
I wasn’t sure why Big Bunny was in trouble, or what it would take to save him, but I wasn’t too worried.
Eventually, I saw a commercial for it and figured out I had misheard it. I still like my version better though.
As a very young kid, I called pizza cutters ‘Steves’ because of some commercials airing in the 90s for… pizza hut? little caesars? … which featured a pizza cutter named Steve.
Yep, here’s an example:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hSnISEnX2Xw&pp=ygUdcGl6emEgY3V0dGVyIHN0ZXZlIGNvbW1lcmNpYWw%3D
I had literally never seen a pizza cutter in real life, never heard it called a pizza cutter, and when my family got one, I assumed it was just called ‘a steve’, rofl.
I thought that the human body was incapable of making glucose. Learned about gluconeogenesis during a university nutrition course
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 on you for challenging beliefs and forming your own opinions. Not easy to pull yourself out of these things.
Good for you because morning Mormons are batshit.
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.
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.
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.
The pronunciation for the name “Byrne”. I was pronouncing it like “by-ernie” as if I were excitedly saying “bye, Ernie! 😃”
Then I found out it’s pronounced like “burn”! 😂
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 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’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.
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.
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.
Funny, in American English, “institutionalized” means “sent to an insane asylum”.
I think this is compounded by the fact that many of the social institutions that used to exist are also greatly reduced, and children are expected to be much more structured now than they were. Used to be that kids could reasonably be expected to walk to a library or playground on their own, or play with neighborhood children, without being constantly supervised. (And yes, bullying happened, and yes, so did the Atlanta Child Murders. But the former was a much more realistic problem than the latter.) Kids were also going with parents to church, parents probably had some kind of social outlet, etc. There was, in general, more community. (I’m not bemoaning the loss of religion, since I think religion is trash, but I do miss the community that religion helped build.)
And yeah, most people I know now that home school kids are doing it to ensure that their kids aren’t exposed to ‘dangerous’ ideas.
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
I floss, rinse, then brush. The fluoride content of toothpaste is much higher than rinse, so I’d rather end having that on my teeth than a weaker dose from the rinse.
I’m referring to rinsing w water or even drinking water
That’s only true in England, because they don’t flourinate their water. In the US, you get plenty of flouride from tap water.
I learned last year that you’re supposed to floss BEFORE you brush. I have no idea why no one ever taught me that.
Yeah you loosen up every thing and then brush it out. Actually, I floss, swish, then brush. I end with brush because the fluoride concentration in toothpaste is much much higher than in most fluoride mouthwash. I’d rather leave that on my teeth after I’m done.
I thought I was smart. I’m not. I’m clever and good at figuring things out, but there is a difference.
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.
I call myself smart enough to know I’m not.
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.
