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.

@echt

Here's one, and bloody depressing:

Take your present age from, say, 85 to be on the generous side. So if you're 30, you have 55 years left, which sounds a lot.

Turn those years into months: 660 and suddenly it feels like nothing. I think it's because we can easily imagine a month, whereas a year is just a bit big.

Sorry for the buzzkill.

Ooh I watched a video in which someone talked about something a little like this - but to use it to value your time with other people. So for instance if your parents are 70 they could perhaps have ten years left to live (hopefully longer!). If you visit them once a month that's actually only 120 more times you'll get to see them. It was meant to be motivational I think (make the most of your time) bit just filled me with absolute horror.

Another one I always think of is progressing technology and what the future holds for humans.
Let me explain:
Technology has sped up and up as time has gone on.
If you took a person from 822AD and teleported him forwards in time 200 years to 1022AD he would still recognise the world. Not too much would have changed and he would quickly adapt.
Transport someone from 1822 to 2022 and much of the Uk would be pretty much totally unrecognisable. He wouldn’t be able to participate in society or understand how day to day life works- from transport to communication, trade, food we eat, electricity, light, heat - just everything totally transformed. Technology exponentially speeds up.
Now imagine someone teleported you from 2022 to 2222. The difference in the way people live would be far far more pronounced to that of someone from 1822-2022. You wouldn’t be able to understand or recognise anything of the way the people in 2222 are living. The technology would be so far out of your understanding. Just as as someone who doesn’t recognise electricity if wouldn’t possibly be able to grasp a smartphone, except for you, the gap would be far wider due to the technology acceleration. Now imagine 500 years or 1000 years ahead.
Blows my mind and I just want to know what’s coming. Wish I could peek ahead with a trusted guide for just one day.

I like to assume there is a multiverse and there are infinite me’s. It’s a comfort to me.

Maybe there’s a me that ended up with the bloke I loved, the one that got away. Maybe there’s a me that isn’t riddled with chronic illness. Maybe there’s a me who’s son didn’t go through the trauma of losing his best friend to cancer as a child.

I sometimes think, “maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up as a different version of me.”, obviously I won’t know it or be conscious of it, but what if every morning you wake up as a different you in a different parallel universe? But your memory of all of the previous ‘you’s’ has been erased, and you wake up with the memories of the current ‘you’.

@Keladrythesaviour

That has made me feel a bit sick

@whatkatiedidnext31

It took until I was 43 to actually comprehend that America and Russia are basically next to each other. We only ever look at a map of the world online or in an atlas with America on the left, Africa middle and Russia on the right/top. Didn’t even think that as we are an actual globe, they would be next to each other….I literally had to sit down, and I think I’m a fairly intelligent person! (Or maybe not!!!)

Maps for the UK will show "us" in the centre. A map in NZ would show that country at the centre (and so on....) and the ?Bering Strait between Russia and the US (Alaska) would be very evident. It is about 50 miles.

@OriginalFloorboards

That horses can’t be sick.

I have horses later in life (never as a child) and it wasn’t until I did a British Horse Society training course that I learned about this. Now I’m paranoid when my young horse tries to eat my bobble off my hats (he’s obsessed with faux fur!).

As it happens, rabbits can't vomit either, and therefore even experts on animals (vets, zoologists etc) still don't know whether they can experience the sensation of nausea.

I have a friend who is 20 years younger than me.
Is weird to think that when I was 20, and hitting the clubs, she was a baby, and at some point destined to meet me.

In the 80s, the Second World War was 40 years ago. Now, the 80s are going on 40 years ago.

@WhenDovesFly

The realisation that we're going in a circle. We fought so hard to get equal rights and protections for women, and they're gradually being eroded because we're not allowed to upset men who think they're women.

This.

@thebloodycatwontstopmeowing

I always think It’s strange and sad that only a few generations later nobody will know who we were. For example I have no idea who my great great grandparents were.

Isn't there a saying.. that death occurs twice? First time when you actually die.. second time when your name is uttered for the last time.

@Wauden

I recently had the horrific realisation that as far as women’s rights and women’s safety go, I think this is as good as it gets and now the reversal starts.

@thebloodycatwontstopmeowing

Not sure how true this is but a female foetus has already developed their eggs, therefore the egg I came from was present when my grandma was pregnant with my mum.

Yes that's true. If you have a daughter, when you're pregnant she has all the eggs that will make you grand children ready.

@XenoBitch had never thought of it like that before. Had a lovely walk today through the countryside, stumbled across a church at the top of a hill, read a few names out on the gravestones. My child was asking me to, think he was fascinated at seeing graves 150 years old.

Isn't there a saying.. that death occurs twice? First time when you actually die.. second time when your name is uttered for the last time.

There’s an old grave yard I walk through and I make a point of picking a grave and ‘speaking’ to that person and imagining their lives. Although their total strangers I get some weird comfort that their ‘memory’ is being kept alive… for the exact reason that in 2 generations the world will have forgotten I existed. And that’s terrifying.

my head is spinning now after taking hours to read everyones comments. Some things i thought about too.

With making decisions every second of the day could change the course of your life.

My last few houses i lived in have been semi detached and my bed is always on a outside wall lol.

i grew up in a terraced and in the attic one end had the chimney the other end my dad bricked it up as it did share with the neighbours.

I have always thought about what ifs? both my grandparents are not born in the UK, yet moved for work and ended up in the same town for my parents to met to make me!

I had a miscarriage then conceived two months later and think that if i never miscarriage my 2nd child as i know wouldnt be here.

I would have a different child.

I remember watching that movie that nobody could sleep and i watched a movie years ago about the butterfly effect.

When i was 30 i thought the first 15 years of my life felt like 15 years then the next 15 years have flown by.

My nan who died recently was ready to go and she said to me everyone i know whos older than me has died, why am i still here.

@prsphne

Isn't there a saying.. that death occurs twice? First time when you actually die.. second time when your name is uttered for the last time.

There’s an old grave yard I walk through and I make a point of picking a grave and ‘speaking’ to that person and imagining their lives. Although their total strangers I get some weird comfort that their ‘memory’ is being kept alive… for the exact reason that in 2 generations the world will have forgotten I existed. And that’s terrifying.

Reminds me of the disney film coco.

When i visit the cemetery, i notice other gravestones and read them and say hello. I also try to walk down the middle, so i dont walk on any graves.

One thing that threw me was hearing my son speak fluently in my language, then realising he had learnt it all from me.

The other one was being alone in a train station with DS waiting for a delayed train. It was at my own city so it is not that I felt vulnerable or had nowhere to stay for the night but I took a look around the empty train station and thought “Oh shit, I am raising a child totally alone in a country that is not my own!”. I guess I was always so busy ensuring he was ok I had not noticed!

@DontStopMeNow7

Thinking about how insignificant we all are as part of just one planet in the whole universe. I get freaked out wondering if we are really the only intelligent life in the universe (rare earth theory) because that’s so eerie; but equally freaked out that we might not be - plus frustrated that I will never meet an alien. Plus all the stuff about space generally and my annoyance that I’m reduced to worrying about just putting food on the table.

I’ve lived in the same cul-de-sac for 17 years and have barely spoken to any of my neighbours.

Had to distance myself from family because they are dysfunctional and potentially controlling towards me specifically. My mind finds it hard to compute the lack of self awareness required and the compulsion to be this way.

Just how much time it takes in a week to pay for and maintain a home to live in, and as a result I only have a few hours per week to actually enjoy time in said home.

Remembering the pre-mobile phone and pre-internet, pre-social media age. I can’t fully remember how that worked but I’m pretty sure it was a happier time in many ways.

How did cats and dogs evolve to be domesticated? I don’t get it.

Having sex with someone who, if you don’t stay together, you may one day pass them in the street and not talk, as if it never happened (?)

Sleeping is weird. Most of us do it all at the same time so half the world is basically inactive and doing nothing at any one time. Periods are weird. Did the timing of the menstrual cycle evolve with us and/or did the lunar cycle play a part? (And does it still because that might explain a lot). Do other mammals get periods? I’ve never personally seen a bleeding animal or one that’s wearing a sanitary pad. Am I moody with pms because my hormones are causing me to be that way or is it because I feel like shit?

My brain still can’t compute how countries came to be /evolved, and aside from when we have wars, we don’t think about it. We just accept borders etc.

Also how come on such a small island we have so many accents. You don’t have to drive all that far to encounter people who sound completely different.

Perception of time I swear literally speeds up the older I get. I know I won’t be alive forever yet I still frequently waste time.

I think too much. Most people who “know” me really don’t, because they don’t know even a tiny fraction of what goes on in my mind.

I don’t think there’s a more interesting subject than astronomy (wish I’d have studied it at school). Every now and then I look up at the night sky and just stare in awe. Finally got a telescope a little while ago and to see Saturn on its side (the only planet on the solar system that is) was mind blowing. Still trying to get a good view of the Andromeda galaxy, to see that will spiral will probably eclipse everything.

When it boils down to it we are on a tiny ball of spinning rock in the vast openness of space. I think most of us are so caught up in daily life that we don’t fully appreciate this. All the wars being fought over tiny strips of land, while we are all on a ball of rock in the middle of nowhere.

The “Pale Blue Dot” (an image of Earth from almost 4 billion miles away and the accompanying comment from Carl Sagan (who got NASA to spin the camera around on Voyager which miraculously captured Earth on a sunbeam) is the most profound message to humanity that I’m aware of. I think if humans fully grasped it there wouldn’t be any wars as we’d realise just how futile and silly it is.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Sagan’s comment on the image:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

• reading that back, Saturn is only heavily tilted, it’s Uranus that’s on its side.

Haven't read the whole thread but mine is, when you're walking through the cemetery, particularly really old ones, and see graves of those who've had whole lives in the past - probably even walked round the same cemetery at some point when the graves were all shiny & new. You see a gravestone with old Enid who died in 1837 and it makes me think nothing really matters - Enid probably had a shit load of problems, most likely spent years worrying but it only mattered for that speck of time she was alive. All of Enid's children will be gone and her descendants most likely don't even know she existed.

I find it strangely comforting.

Also, how i used to look at people my age now and think they were sorted; if anything bad happened they'll be the ones to take charge and be the adult. But now I'm the adult I wonder if those people I thought that of in the past were actually as clueless as me

I look at the stars and pretend I'm looking down on us and feel we are like just one big video game. Collecting and spending shineys.

Death scares me. People just gone. Just like that.

I have a overthinking, busy brain. I can't get my head around how we all think differently and how what Im thnking about now - you have no idea about at all, but my brain seemd to think everyone knows it. And I've no clue what you are thinking about.