Things that are really weird when you think about them

[Shitshitshitshit]

Someone said to me today that balloons are like a plastic bag of someone's breath...

I'd never thought of it like that before and to be honest it made me feel a bit nauseous!

Do you have anymore examples of things that are actually really fucking weird when you think about it?

Great thread, OP!

Loving reading others' thoughts on the same shit that bothers me 🤔😆

Why we dangle decorations off the sides of our heads.

Islands.
I think about how I'd panic if I was on a tiny island in the middle of an ocean with no way to get off.
Then I realise I live on the British mainland which is an island and I feel less worried.
But then I realise I live on a tiny planet in the middle of a huge universe and I feel panic again.

For me it's the way the entire trajectory of a life could have been changed by one seemingly inconsequential decision.

For me it was that if I hadn't got my Saturday job as a teenager, I'd never have met my best friend, who'd never have gone on to another job where he met and introduced me to the man who would become my boyfriend, whose sister encouraged me to apply for a job at her workplace, where a met the man who would eventually become my DH.

I wouldn't have thought, aged 16, that by applying for a job on a supermarket checkout, I was starting down a path that would eventually lead to marriage and kids, but I was. If I hadn't applied for that job, I wouldn't be sitting on this sofa, in this house, with that husband and those children asleep upstairs. I'd be leading an entirely different life. I find that a very weird thought!

Universal constants: maths numbers like e and pi. Never mind i the impossible square root of -1.

They are ridiculous when you think about it yet they keep popping up all over the physical world being really very helpful to engineers and scientists. What is that all about?

I find it weird how people think they have answers to things that they could never possibly know. Anything from being absolutely sure there’s no afterlife to even theorising about novels or tv shows.

Birth and death.

One minute you’re just a few layers of skin away from being in the actual outside world.

Then one second your technically alive and hopefully, amongst loved ones, and the next, you’ve departed from human existence and you get taken away from your friends and family who will never see you again.

I think I need some existential therapy 😂

The first person born with straight blonde hair. Did all the other humans go wtf is wrong with your bairn's hair Og?

How you can have chemistry with some people and other people repulse you without you saying a word to each other.

That you had the eggs that became your babies inside you all your life until they were born.

How someone figured out how to harness electricity.

I agree with kissing - also that we close our eyes while we do it. Why?!

Because you go cross eyed

Oh of course 🤦🏻‍♀️

Going for a walk with no purpose other than for pleasure. Such a weirdly human thing.

Yes@Amibeingnaive !!

A completely random, meaningless, inconsequential decision can lead to the existence of whole, new human beings. That might not (would not!) have ever existed, without that inconsequential decision.

Aeroplanes...gigantic , heavy lumps of metal that manage to stag airborne..mostly.
Deja vu...had it giving birth...weird.

Billionaires...how on earth did they manage it while most just struggle through life.

Climate change...strange that we are living through such a pivotal time.

Just life in general is weird .

Colours. How do I know that the colour I describe as blue is the same colour that you see? For all I know you might see the sky as yellow but call it blue so we both assume it's the same "blue".

And in the same vein (this thought somehow blows my mind more than the above)... If people see colours differently, does that mean that someone out there sees, for example, purple and yellow when I see purple and pink, and therefore thinks the colours they see go together because that's what they've been taught?!

Mine was covered twice on page one, and again on page 18 which is where I leave this comment most likely.

Kissing.

Because the act of kissing itself doesn't cause reproduction. So who was the first human who decided to kiss the way we do.

noideaatallreallyandeveryone else interestedin language can I recommend some books? Both by David Crystal, the cambridge encyclopedia of language and the cambridge encyclopedia of English.

They are both the type of books you can dip in and out of but fascinating things like why we use an 's' for plurals in English to the politics of languages.

I think cars are quite weird.

I can imagine people way in the future finding some car remains, and not believing that we all hurtled about at high speed in them. A bit like we think people in chariots recklessly hurtled about and think it sounds highly dangerous.

Will they be wondering why we had to use them so much?

Because the act of kissing itself doesn't cause reproduction. So who was the first human who decided to kiss the way we do

According to my brother Roman soldiers used to smell the breath of their wife when they returned to see if they had been drinking, this developed into a kiss.

No idea where he got this from but it's a possibility.

All the usual that have been mentioned- space, sex, death.

One I have thought of often is what if aliens exist but they’re not even vaguely like us? What if aliens are a gas? Or a liquid? They might already be here from another planet but we’ve got no way of communicating with the gas or liquid or whatever so we don’t know they’re here because they can’t make themselves known.

We do see colours differently. DH, DD and I often have this conversation because I sometimes call things black or brown when they see dark blue, and we definitely disagree on some of the different shades of blue/green.
This may explain why I really hate the yellowish colour that is so popular at the moment. It's a sort of mustardy gold and to me it looks just like diarrhoea. Why would you walk into a shop and think 'What a lovely colour. I will cover myself in that coat the colour of loose faeces.'?

One day your Mum was carrying you, put you down and never picked you up again.

I read a quote about how no two people have ever read the same book because of how we imagine it. That blew my mind. No one else has imagined a character to look exactly like I see them (unless presumably you picture them like they look in a film version of a book).

Also, I have a relative that's just turned 95. If she as a baby had had a relative that was 95 then she could plausibly have met someone born in the 1830's.

I always assumed kissing was instinctive.
There are people alive today whose grandparents were born in the 18th century. I think!