I dont remember the age, but it was before Kindergarten, thought men came into the house at night to load the next days shows into the TV.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    77·
    1 year ago

    I thought that when the clerk at the checkout asked, “would you like cash back?” That you could say yes and they would just give you cash straight out of the register for nothing lol.

    I figured that most people were very honest and didn’t need the money, so they would just say no thanks and leave it in the register for somebody who really did need it.

  • 11181514@lemm.ee
    67·
    1 year ago

    So many things…

    I didn’t understand how lie detectors were supposed to work so I thought you could hook someone up and ask something like “does god exist” and you’d be able to get answers to all of life’s big mysteries.

    I thought there was a left and right sock

    I thought wolverines were mythical creatures

    I thought if I tried hard enough I could somehow become older than my older brother like it was just a title or something

    Thanks to DARE any time I saw a skittle with the S missing I thought it was drugs even in a newly opened package

    I could go on…

  • GCanuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    1 year ago

    I was trying to figure out what caused wind. I noticed the leaves moving when the wind blew, and I knew that a fan (handheld) also moved wind. So it stood to reason that trees moved causing the leaves to move which caused the wind. And naturally it must be earthquakes that caused the tree to love. And then I thought, we’ll there must be a master tree that started the wind, and the most “logical” place for that tree would be the North Pole.

    So, that there was a tree on the North Pole that caused all the wind.

    • ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world
      15·
      1 year ago

      Pretty sure that could be the basis for a series of children’s novels that were eventually adapted into a trilogy (or more) of movies.

      • chillhelm@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 year ago

        It’s a trilogy of children’s books, where the first two get a movie each and the last book is split into 2.

    • averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Except for the North Pole, I had the exact same idea. I got to the idea of a single tree controlling things then got my hands on a Red Ryder Carbine-action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle and forgot about trees.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    That sheep and goats were same species. I thought sheep were the girl versions and goats were the boys, like hens and roosters.

    Wasn’t until well into my 20s that I finally ran into something that put the spotlight on it… IIRC it was some Farmville type of videogame, which included males and females of both sheep and goats. To me, that stood out the same way a “female bull” or “male cow” would have, so I had a little chuckle at the obvious ‘oversight’. Realized shortly after that I was, in fact, a fucking idiot.

  • SBJ@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    463·
    1 year ago

    I used to tell my kids that the ice cream truck only plays music when they are out of ice cream. My kids are older now and know the truth but think of all of the money I saved.

  • arby@lemmy.world
    39·
    1 year ago

    When I was five or six, I think I must have dreamed that my dad could turn his head around 360 degrees. A few days later I was in the car with my Dad and asked him if he could really turn his head around. He responded “not now, I’m driving.” I took that as a yes. It was years before I realized the truth…

    • nittiyh@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      I laughed so hard 😂 not even questioning wth you’re talking about, just going straight for the worldview altering statement. I can only wish I had that much wit and humor.

  • spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works
    38·
    1 year ago

    I thought black and what television was black and white because history happened in black and white. I suppose that means life in colour happened after the invention of colour tv

  • troglodytis@lemmy.world
    33·
    1 year ago

    Grew up on a dairy goat farm. I noticed we ate most of the boys and kept all the girls.

    I was so scared; I had to ask my mom which one of me and my brothers were they gonna keep.

  • edric@lemm.ee
    29·
    1 year ago

    There was a coca cola plant in my hometown. When we were kids, my dad used to tell us that the huge water tanks that were painted as coke and sprite cans actually contained soda and I always imagined diving in them. Obviously he was just fucking with us, but I actually believed it for a while.

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
    28·
    1 year ago

    I remember asking my dad if the Earth ever got heavier besides when meteors landed and babies were born.

    I couldn’t comprehend that babies were made out of food. I thought they just came from nothing.

    • indepndnt@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      Apart from the babies thing, that’s still a very interesting question. I bet someone knows the answer, but I wonder if the weight of the earth increases or decreases on average. I’d have to guess it’s a net increase from picking up stuff as we move through space, which probably dwarfs the mass of stuff we’ve sent out (especially if you don’t count satellites since they’re more or less still tied to earth). I don’t think there’s anything like natural ejections of matter from earth either.

        • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Yes, the mass has been increasing: meteors bombarding the earth daily

          It can’t really be said there is a net-gain in mass (in fact most websites seem to estimate a net loss).

          https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/297622/is-the-earth-gaining-or-losing-mass-over-time

          also plants make their food out of pretty much the definition of nothing, massless particles that makes its way up the food chain

          I don’t know what you mean by «massless particles», but plants do not make food out of “the definition of nothing”. Photosynthesis is a chemical process and like any other chemical process due to the law of conservation of mass (disregarding mass-energy equivalence), the mass of the reagents is the same as the mass of the products. The sugars produced during photosynthesis weren’t just produced with light as input. Light is the energy source that fuels the reaction in the light dependent of phase of photosynthesis, which has water as input, whose products (besides oxygen molecules which are a “useless” byproduct of the reaction) are used to produce the sugars in the non-light dependent phase which also takes carbon dioxide as input (there are obviously more substances involved in the reaction but they are “reused” between the two phases).

          So, the mass of the “food” of the plant is in reality obtained from water and carbon dioxide, not out of “nothingness”.

  • vettnerk@lemmy.ml
    27·
    1 year ago

    That me parents didn’t have parents growing up. It somehow never dawned on me until I was like 7 that my grandparents were their parents, despite knowing my grandparents all my life.

  • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
    25·
    1 year ago

    I thought superheroes were real and all lived in New York. To be fair, it was my only contact with Western culture.

    • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.ee
      12·
      1 year ago

      never been to times square? spiderman and thor are walking around and will take a photo with you for five bucks. the one thing people dont know is they have very thick foreign accents, which change depending on the day of the week for some reason