There is no god and adults are assholes.

That nobody is a “grown up” and that everyone is faking it.

We’re all just kids having kids.

When I was about 10 I realized that people of other religions probably felt just as strongly that their religion is “true” as I felt about mine and that I had no grounds to look down on them.

Fast forward 10 years and I became an atheist.

I used to spend a lot of energy being concerned what other people thought of me. How I dressed, how I acted, what I owned, etc. One day I realized 2 things:

1. Most people are too busy thinking about themselves to spare any meaningful thoughts for me.

2. I’m never going to see most of these people ever again so it doesn’t matter what they think.

After that I started directing that energy into making sure that I approved of my choices rather than hoping strangers would.

Friends can matter to you more than family, and that’s ok, but family does a lot more for you than you realize.

I didn’t have a great family, but it was only when I was upset about a birthday party when I was like 12 where my mom made all the cards and buttons and stuff and I was so mad that it wasn’t the cool cards and prizes that you buy that I kind of realized it.

It dawned on me like two weeks later that my parents couldn’t afford any of that, but they took time out of their day, for like two weeks, even though they both worked too much, to hand-make approximations as best they could. Without me knowing, so I would be surprised.

Ever work a double shift and then spend the few minutes you have not working, sleeping, or cooking to hand-make party favors? Yeah, me either.

It still makes me cry thinking about how ungrateful I was and the look of sadness and yearning on my mom’s face when I got mad at her for not buying the “good” stuff.

When I was 20, I sat her down and told her about it and how bad I felt, and how I never knew how to apologize for it. We had a good cry, and she thanked me for seeing it eventually, and how happy it retroactively made her knowing I realized it so soon after.

After my nerve damage: there are some mistakes you can only make once.

Say what you mean; mean what you say.

No idea where I heard or read it, but preteen me internalized it and it’s become part of my creed to this day

I can learn everything I need to know about how to be a decent person from cartoons.

Cartoons have always shown me that being a friendly person, who is honest, do right by their friends and tries to do the right thing will guide me well through life. I needed to weed through the friends a little bit but that has held true thus far

There’s a book series called The Hammer and the Cross about an English bastard child of a noblewoman that resulted from her being taken by a Viking raid and later escaping back to her home. Then the Vikings invade to avenge the death of Ragnar (his 4 sons are each powerful Viking Jarls).

The way it handled the two religions clashing, where each was powerful based on how many followers they had, along with it being the first time I’d seen where Christianity isn’t presented as the Underlying Truth but was just another thing. I realized that it was a metaphor for how religion actually worked. If enough people believe in something, it gains power. Christianity won through politics and warfare, not through truth. There wasn’t anything special separating Christianity from other former religions we largely now refer to as myth other than the one Empire that united most of Europe declared it to be the truth and people were slaughtered until they went along with it.

That’s when I stopped being a Catholic that just hated going to church and was an atheist at first, then later settled into agnosticism since who knows what’s going on beyond what we can directly detect with our senses and tools.

“Family” isn’t what you are born in, it’s what you decide and stand for. Fuck that kind of “family” I was born with, these useless, manipulative, egoistic, stupid waste of oxygen.

I was about 11 or so and acting out, my teacher said my name. I just froze for a moment and it dawned on me that was the first time he had said my name all day. Completely invisible unless I was doing something wrong. Just a square shape in a square hole unless I choose otherwise and if I do it by making my life worse.

I guess it doesn’t sound profound. Every guy knows this on some level but it really knocked the wind out of me at the time.

You cannot change how someone feels about anything. You can try, but that’s only going to be some formula of what you did + plus their life experiences against how they feel about you andh ow they are feeling in the moment.

Negative numbers. I just asked if there were numbers below zero when I was like 4, and my mom about pissed herself. Not that it stopped her from homeschooling me into ignorance instead.

People hate what they fear and fear what they don’t understand. The path, then, to fight against hate is specifically understanding

I learned this by watching The Crocodile Hunter as a child. I remember very vaguely a point Steve Irwin made about how people are terrified and act to harm animals they know nothing about. Either he went on to further say, or I extrapolated it myself, that knowing how an animal will act informs YOU on how to approach the situation; No need for fear or hate if you understand the reality of the situation. I then further extrapolated this race relations. It’s a little general, but a white person may be racist against a black person because they think they’re dangerous, just as someone might see a snake they know nothing about and think it dangerous

As a kid I got a lot of “Do as I say not as I do.”

The lesson I learned is that a lot of grown ups are hypocrites. I saw this so much it made me decide I would always be honest with myself and others about why I was doing the things I was doing. It is not always easy, especially now that I have kids of my own, but it is much healthier in the long run. I teach my kids by example rather than preaching fake piety.