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?

@fairyjuice that's amazing 😂 never thought of that!

not weird but I constantly marvel at human society and how we got so sophisticated. On my phone I can call someone on a video link in rural China and they pick up and we talk and it's free. And how we've built cities and agreed on laws and worked out how to enforce them

On the weird front: sugar free jelly. We've invented a calorie free food for when you want to eat but dont need the calories. Imagine explaining that to a cave person

I could post a million times on this thread!

Driving, the fact that we all sit in the pretty much same position, travelling in the same direction, doing different things in our cars but all moving in a tin box

But also on a much deeper level, that everyone we drive past, has their own life going on and we don't know what's happening in that persons life.

I remember one day I was driving back from the hospital visiting my grandma when we knew she wasn't going to live much longer- it was a particularly bad day and I was so angry and upset driving home and I was driving particularly slow when I should've been going faster, when a car started flashing their lights like a mad man, and overtook me and swore at me on the way past. I had to pull up before I had a mental breakdown- that bloke had no idea what I was going through, and he could've had an equally shit day too, but on the roads we judge people as simply a "driver" not human beings with feelings and emotions and memories and experiences

Also same @soulrunner , even in just the past 100 years how far the Earth and cities and technology has progressed. My mind cannot fathom it, we have huge sky scrapers that someone don't topple over in the wind, we can e-mail and facetime people in all 4 corners of the globe, someone can make something in China and 1 week later its in my house in Yorkshire

Even the fact that we can speak other peoples languages is amazing. I get why we have languages, but who was the first person to successfully translate something another person said, and how did either of them know it was correct the translation?

Yes, I probably would, including dog if it tasted nice. I think if you eat animals you eat animals don't you?

I don't think that's a commonly held view, hence dog meat being illegal.

In the UK, maybe, but it’s an everyday food in several Asian countries. Many millions of people in India must be horrified at us in the West routinely eating cows.

That's the weird thing though, isn't it? That we think some animals are ok to eat and not others.

I also think about the whole water-recycling thing too. Like is the water in my tea the same water that flushed someone's jobby recently < not envy

I'll second kissing. It's so gross.
So is oral sex. Seems so right at the time, but ewww

Pooing. Everybody does it. It’s weird to think that the Queen and Teresa May and your dc’s Headteacher have to poo.

How toys became 'gendered'. DS2 loves my little ponies at the moment, much to MIL's horror. When did it become socially correct that children with female anatomy should play with horses and wear pink clothes and children with male anatomy should wear blue and play with cars.

It sometimes makes me uneasy that we are sat on a big spinning ball in the middle of space but we can't feel it spinning.

What happens after we die?

Nobody truly knows- even people that "die" then come back to life- I still don't think it's enough to know what happens

Do we just seize to exist and everything turns to nothing and we're not even aware we're dead

Do we get re-born as someone else

Do we aimlessly float around the earth haunting people as we please

I'm gonna be posting on here for the rest of the afternoon now

Time.

What is the actual point of it? Why do we need to distinguish between 11am and 3pm? And who decided that these hours will be called these hours. Why doesn't midnight begin earlier or later. We all operate our lives to this fictional, made-up timescale

**What happens after we die?

Nobody truly knows- even people that "die" then come back to life- I still don't think it's enough to know what happens

Do we just seize to exist and everything turns to nothing and we're not even aware we're dead**

I know it’s an obvious one but I think about it all the time. My friend died recently. I had a conversation with her in hospital the day before she died. She said she just got sleepy and didn’t even realise it was happening. Now she’s gone. Her Facebook/ messages are still there but I can’t talk to her. Is she watching over us all? Or is she just asleep but forever. No one will ever know and it’s so hard to think about! I understand birth but death is just beyond all understanding.

Similar to the not knowing if other people see colour the same way we do - not knowing quite what other people see when they look at you. Even if someone were to paint you as they see you, you’d probably see it differently.
When I look in the mirror, I see a tired 32 year old with acne and clogged pores, the odd chin hair and the beginnings of wrinkles. When DP looks at me, he sees the sexiest woman he’s ever met. I don’t understand how he can see that! But he does. It’s like he has an inbuilt filter and after years of not believing people who said that it was a thing, it’s fascinating.

Re: death, I once read that a lot of trippy chemicals are released in our brains as we die, and they may affect the way we perceive time so it seems to go really slowly in our final moments (the way a dream can last 5 actual minutes but feel like hours when we're in it). Maybe it's a much slower process than we imagine (which puts me off getting cremated!)

Trippy death chemical = DMT

www.independent.co.uk/news/science/drugs-dmt-near-death-experience-psychedelic-hallucinogenic-imperial-college-london-a8491691.html

See I'm supposed to be working... And now I'm freaking out about trippy death chemicals!

I always find the whole weed being illegal thing weird when you actually think about it. Not that I smoke it or really care but it's weird to think that it's literally just a plant. And it's illegal.

Time - minutes, hours, days, months etc. We are so totally ruled by it yet it is a man-made construct that doesn't quite fit with the number of times and when the sun rises and sets.

Countries are just lines drawn on a map by humans so yes patriotism, nationalism and wars along these lines are quite baffling.

Also religions. All made up by humans. They all basically have 'be nice to others' at the heart of their idealogy and yet people spend huge amounts of effort killing or persecuting others in the name of religion.

I was only thinking the other day how weird undertakers are!
How there are people that get paid to collect dead people from other people and take them somewhere else. Why don't we remove our own dead people?

And like many others- I've always thought cats are weird, and imagine explaining to a visiting alien about how we have these miniature tigers voluntarily living with us and not eating us.

The 1990s are to today's children what the 1950s were to me as a child. Might as well be 200 years ago.

Modern aviation. Not so much the aspect of flight (which is amazing in itself) but the fact that there is an insane amount of people/animals/cargo just up there in the sky at any given point in time. I live somewhere quite a lot of high altitude air traffic flies over so see hundreds of contrails a day and I often just wonder about the amount of people on the plane, what stage of the flight are they in, 200 odd people right above me in a metal tube watching movies and eating crap food, its just all so weird when you think about it. Right now from my office window I can see 4 contrails, so that's approximately 1000 odd people depending on plane capacity, speeding on by at hundreds of miles an hour. I love flying and it just always fascinates me but just so weird at the same time!

Drinking cows breast milk.

I find it bizzare that people turn their noses up at the thought of drinking breast milk from your own species. But drinking a cows is ok.

It takes about 7 years for every cell in your body to have died and been replaced with a new one. I have a materially completely different body to the one I had 7 years ago.

Someone just mentionaed undertakers upthread.
Undertakers are one part of life that have managed to rip off the public for years and years and years and never really been held to account! My dad is 97 and he used to say that they were ' a licence to print money' and many east end undertakers are quite rich as they keep the tradition going through the family as well.

my in laws paid up front for two funerals with Age Uk back in 03 and they paid 3000 for both. the same ( very modest ) funeral would cost that, and more, for just one funeral. how can that be right?

You have to pay for the plot of land or use of the crem anyway and i doubt most people would not want to bring a coffin to a crem or burial place in the back of their own car or van, but honestly, the cost of the other bits is eye watering. some of them play on the fact that there isnt any other way of going about things i think - when really, it just cannot cost that much? A 'paupers' funeral isnt easy to arrange either and still costs thousands i believe? so much debt at at time when they have lost a loved one.
It is something that really upsets me - the costs should be looked into but it never is and people just have to pay up!

I presume undertakers started up because they had a cart to carry the coffin and most of the population wouldn't have been able to afford to own a horse and cart and then it became traditional.

The cost of funerals really are scary. I can't afford to die!

My grandma actually just bought her plot recently in a lovely graveyard with a view over the countryside. The one next to it was free as well so she asked my dad if he wanted to look into purchasing it!!! How strange is that, buying your own grave. She's chuffed as well that she got a nice one with a good view.

I don't get why people are confused by colours.

Yes, a small minority of people do see some colours differently or are colour blind, but on the whole, blue is blue, yellow is yellow, red is red, etc.

If you were to go into a Resene shop and walk up to the colour chart wall and ask the person next to you, to point to the pink swatches, or the neutrals, or the greens - the vast majority of people would point to the same colours.