To ask for weird realisations you’ve had about life?

[goergia]

Things about mundane life that you’ve never given much thought but suddenly think “Now I think about it, that’s weird.”

I had one of these today. I live in a mid-terrace, neighbours are nice and quiet and we don’t hear a peep. A few days ago I had a snoop at one of the next-door neighbour’s house on Rightmove after seeing it was for sale, and realised that they have their bed right up against our party wall as I do mine. So even though I sleep in bed alone every night, there’s actually 2 people who I don’t really know just a couple of inches away from me! I don’t know why but for some reason it creeps me out. I’ve realised that in terraced houses you’re actually sharing one building with lots of people, many of whom you will NEVER interact with.

Haven't had time yet to RTFT so apologies if this has been mentioned.

Sleep - how come we aren't aware of the moment we fall asleep.

Also regarding sleep - we are unconscious on a raised platform (bed) a foot or more off the ground and yet we don't ever roll off when we are unconscious. If we were stuck on a cliff edge partway up a massive mountain would we dare fall asleep (because I would be terrified that I would roll off!) What's the fundamental difference?

[quote Pitafalafel]@Mermaidwaves
Nothing happens I reckon. What happens to the ant that gets stepped on by someone walking to the shops? Not a lot. We’re just a bigger and cleverer version of that ant, but our lives have no more significance in universal/existential terms.[/quote]
I concur. We have convinced ourselves how advanced humanity is and that we're the centre of everything, but we are nothing but more advanced versions of the other animals on this planet.

We use tools. We communicate with sounds. We eat to survive. We procreate. We fight. We suffer fear. We experience affection.

We still live lives governed by the same base human traits )love and fear and anger and aggression and ego and so on) that we did thousands of years ago, hence why we still have wars and societies obsessed with sex and fame and riches.

We may be able to split the atom and theorise on the nature of the universe, but to an advanced species passing by our planet in some kind of interdimensional vessel, we're just slightly smarter monkeys.

I find it mind blowing that a spiral galaxy with millions stars, rotates at nearly 500,000 miles per hour.

More thoughts after reading these:

It’s weird that in public we all act a certain way with each other, wear clothes and are all civilised. There are so many rules for how to act about so many things that we don’t even think about. Yet we all spend time on the toilet and have sex. Also sometimes I literally don’t know how we manage to fit so much in to our daily lives when we have to go to work.

People really can be totally stupid, especially the ones in charge or with important jobs. Like most people I don’t consider myself to be stupid but how can I be sure? But even if I’m not, I really don’t want to be in charge anyway so maybe I shouldn’t criticise.

Just how amazing music is. When I was a child listening to my parents diss so many songs I genuinely believed that eventually ideas for songs would ‘run out’ and there’d be no new music. Imagine my joy at eventually realising that will never be the case. Lol. Also, my mind boggles by people who are completely blaze about music and they don’t think about lyrics, like, ever.
Yet with films there now seems to be less creativity as if ideas are running out.

The nature/nuture debate. Some identical twins that get separated at birth go on to make almost identical decisions about their lives, including marrying people with the same name. Yet my brother and I, raised in the same home with the same parents, could not be more different. I actually feel we don’t even know each other. They say that if a wild animal could speak our language, we still wouldn’t understand them, or they us, because our frames of reference & experiences would be so different. That’s how different I feel to my own family. Yet I can sometimes meet a total stranger and really click, have so much in common in how we think, yet we come from very different backgrounds.

That even though I’m not aware of it my brain is taking in so much! I had a dream the other night and there was a man in it who I absolutely did not know at all! I can’t help but question was I just standing next to him in the tube fourteen years ago and stored his face???

@Cindie943811A

That glass is semi liquid and overtime moves — so ancient panes of glass are thicker at the bottom edge because the molecules of glass or whatever have moved with gravity. Sorry not a scientist so don’t possess the correct terminology but you get my drift,I hope. Similarly that everything consists of molecules which move. Electricity “flows” along the wires. It’s all so weirdly magical.

Actually this isn't true about glass.

Contrary to the urban legend that glass is a slow-moving liquid,it's actually a highly resilient elastic solid, which means that it is completely stable. So those ripples, warps, and bull's eye indentations you see in really old pieces of glass “were created when the glass was created,”

@Comedycook

I had a horrible thought once whilst sitting with dh and my 2dc. One day, there will only be one of us left and the remaining one will have been to all three of our funerals. Pretty depressing

Unless you're all killed in the same accident.

Sorry. Just thought that whilst we were doing sobering realisations......

@Fuckitsstillraining

I moved 120km from one part of Ireland to another, I'm from a part with a very nondescript accent understandable by all but really struggled to understand a lot of people where I moved to, they could all understand me but 13 years on I'm still stumped sometimes. A colleague of my husband is a mystery to me, I simply haven't a clue what he's saying sometimes.

Did you move to Kerry? I holidayed there every summer for my entire childhood and was completely stumped by the speed and accent of some of the people that I used to meet regularly. People working in shops were generally fine as they had learned to slow down for the tourists but the neighbours and local farmers just went at a million miles an hour.

I always used to think people stopped having petty relationship issues when they got older, but nothing really changes from playground days. There are still cliques and ghosting and people taking offence at the slightest thing in all age groups.

@Iamtired123

We bring life into the world, just to destroy it. All for a couple minutes of pleasure on our taste buds. I cant think about it too much or I'll end up crying all day.

Bringing life in to the world and pleasure on your taste buds would appear to me to be mutually exclusive 😉

Unless you're all killed in the same accident

Sorry. Just thought that whilst we were doing sobering realisations......

Yikes...there's another one for me to think about. Cheers for that

That no-one really know what they're doing, even the ones 'in charge' we're all just winging and bluffing our way through a lot of the time.

@Tabitha005

That, when we die, the atoms we're made of just carry on as if nothing had happened.

Can you expand? As in elaborate, not can your atoms expand when you die!!

@Oblomov22

I like this. Life is such an odd thing. We are such a minuscule part of the universe. So many people are stupid.

Oh my god this made me laugh so much. I want to make it into an inspirational meme.

I remember when I had my first baby just sitting staring at her thinking wow this is how everyone comes into the world- , a sweet innocent little baby, completely dependent on others. The world’s greats- Einstein, Newton etc and the darkest figures in history, Hitler etc all were tiny babies at one point.

I wasn't all that interested in dinosaurs as a child so I was pretty damned surprised when I learned that they had existed for about 165 million years before the big extinction 65 million years ago. I had somehow thought that the dominant species would continuously evolve in intelligence until they were tool users/technological, and the only reason that the dinosaurs didn't was because their evolution was cut short. But dinosaurs were probably never going to do that, they evolved but only into different adaptations for different environments. They never got to the stage where they could deliberately control their environment. Humans did this pretty quickly, even if you start counting from the big extinction.

This makes a big difference for the Drake equation which is the probability of intelligent life on other planets. I had previously assumed that complex life would inevitably become intelligent life, but if it doesn't then that means far, far less chance of one day observing life on another planet.

After getting seriously ill myself I realised that generally people don't expect to ever get sick. That you just float around not thinking about it and then it's a massive shock when it happens. I mean not that I expect people to be thinking about it all the time but it's weird because most people will get properly sick at some point and illness is just a part of life.

Presumably that the atoms that form our molecules are not really impinged or changed by being within a human except the the extent that the chemical bonds might differ in a few cases? if any of the molecules of life differ from that which would happen to those atoms in inorganic systems. Once we die, the atoms would be released to carry on un-impinged by being within a human.

Slightly different but as a PP said, every atom of an element larger than H or He? that forms the matter in humans was formed by a supernovae in a now dead star (big stars die more quickly) earlier in the universe.

@GatoradeMeBitch

That every single human being, including those with the most evil depraved behaviours starts life as someone's dear little baby.

Sadly, some babies are never loved, not even from day one.

I meant to type that everyone starts as a defenceless innocent baby, and everyone is someone's child.

That actually being adopted is a massive fucking big deal and has affected every part of my life. I was brought up with the (very much of the time) suggestion that I was "lucky." Very recently realised I'm actually not that lucky and suggesting otherwise is downright fucking rude.

Just because something is written in law doesn’t make it fair.

Infact I’m not sure fair even exists at all. I’m less faithful in the idea of if you keep doing the right thing you’ll eventually reap the rewards. The older I get the less life seems to work that way

I’ve been thinking about the meaning of life a bit lately.

What I realised is that it couldn't be less about us enjoying life or achieving great things as it is literally, at a cellular level, about a species trying to survive and continue. We could be frogs or grass or dust mites or viruses, it doesn't matter. There's a subconscious need in us to exist and procreate so that the species can live on, and we just happen to be sentient and smart enough that we have figured out how to live longer than we actually need to. The average life expectancy of cavepeople was 25 years old – old enough to have kids, help them survive to sexual maturity, then die. Job done!

Since nothing we’re conditioned to think matters actually does and life will be over in the blink of an eye anyway, I may as well just enjoy the day to day and try not to sweat the small stuff. It’s quite a relief, really!

I meant to type that everyone starts as a defenceless innocent baby, and everyone is someone's child

That blows my mind sometimes that older people (company directors etc) were ever once a school kids or the new kid in the office.

I frequently ponder how bread was first made/discovered/invented and then that sends me spiralling about all the other foods we eat and how people figured out they were good and edible, especially foods that are only edible when cooked! And that further sends me down the rabbit hole of how people came up with all the recipes of the world and then I realise I've stood in the kitchen staring into space for an hour without having even started dinner.

On a more sad and serious note, only within the last year or so I've realised from listening to other accounts of women that there are lots of men in the world who absolutely HATE women but are still sexually attracted to them. I know that sounds weird and should have been very obvious as I have been subjected to my fair share of bad male behaviour in the context of sexual attraction, but it was very depressing to read that this behaviour is not limited to creeps and serial killers.

@Imabouttoexplode - I'm no scientist, but this explained it quite neatly for me: futurism.com/science-explained-atoms-last-forever