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.

Just how big Instagram is. It's fucking enormous!!

Trust. It's a weird one, I really think it's mainly based on observed reactions to different situations and therefore you can't ever really say that you fully trust someone when we don't even know ourselves that well to say we will always do X or won't ever do Y.

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.

To quote a meme, "Life is like a roll of toilet paper .... the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes."

I’m struck by how many of these are prompted by a lack of knowledge of history. As someone who is an historian and spends all her working life researching various aspects of the past, this feels very alien to me.

There’s been a gradual and deliberate erosion of the humanities in education in favour of STEM subjects, and this is a mistake. We can’t know and understand how things are today unless we understand the journey that brought us here. Better knowledge of history would render a lot of these musings irrelevant.

Current politicians would do well to learn more history, in order to better understand the impact of their actions and policies, and to avoid making gross errors in policy and action.

That there’s a landscape under the sea that we can’t see. Valleys and mountain ranges and plains and even rivers (currents).

I spend way too much head time thinking about weird shit which has absolutely zero impact on my daily life.

Like........

• The sheer scale and size of the universe. The fact that there are more stars in the known universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth, and we still have no idea how many there are in the unknown universe. The fact that when we see distant stars in the sky, there light is millions of years old and maybe emanating from a solar system where species have already thrived and died in the time it takes their light to reach us. We are so tiny it's hard to comprehend or apply any scale which has relatable meaning to us.

• And related to the above ........... is the universe infinite? If it isn't, that suggests there a wall or barrier or some kind of physical end to it. Or maybe it just loops round on itself, but that too suggests it's in an enclosed sphere of some kind. And if it is infinite, that's even more terrifying; an infinite universe means there is a totally unlimited number of permutations of events and planets and so on. In an infinite universe, there has to be another you - maybe trillions and trillions of miles away - sitting reading the same thing right now, because infinity allows for every possible scenario that could occur to occur.

• The Matrix may be a work of fiction about living in a simulation but it hammered home something we all know; 'reality' as we know it is based entirely on what our senses (sight, sound, touch and so on) tell us. Information is transmitted from our eyes and ears and translated by our brain. If we're all plugged into some kind of machine generating those exact same signals and sending them to our brains, how would we ever know the difference?

Asides from all that, no existential crises otherwise

The number of events all happening which led to me having my dd. We were travelling last week in a different part of the country and passed a big company and I told her I used to know someone who worked there, and they got me into my sport which led to me meeting DH. That blew my mind but then I realised the randomness of me knowing the friend because I’d gone on a certain holiday, then the number of people between that friend and the club I eventually met dh at was huge, and if I hadn’t met even one of them DD wouldn’t exist.

There’s been a gradual and deliberate erosion of the humanities in education in favour of STEM subjects, and this is a mistake. We can’t know and understand how things are today unless we understand the journey that brought us here. Better knowledge of history would render a lot of these musings irrelevant.

Yes this. Pains me to say it started under the last Labour government when Charles Clarke was education secretary. He couldn’t see the use of subjects like Classics, history, philosophy and archaeology.

Genetics. When my dd was born I looked at her and said to her dad, she looks just like you. At the same time he said to me that she looks just like you.

She does look a bit like each of us and is at the same time perfectly unique, her very own self. She has traits that are just like me when I was a child. And I get that there are traits that she learns from us but there are things that I don’t do anymore. I was a climber when I was young. I climbed everything. My dd was a climber before she even walked, just like me. She never saw me climb anything when she was a baby. Of course I have had to climb things as she got older, to help her down when she gets stuck.

Genetics is pretty amazing.

@zafferana - I have a Geography degree and work in a field where I rely on the knowledge of colleagues who are experts coastal flooding / tides, I’d just either forgotten or never had it explained to me in that way before, so it was a bit of a brain clunk moment.

Agree on your point about people not knowing basic science, but then I don’t know about things that others are experts in that they might assume everyone should know, so we all bring something unique to the world

@MBM18

I find it hard (and sad) to get my head around that one day we just die and that's it. Years and years will pass and most of us will be forgotten about. Sometimes I think of that in bed before sleep and have to quickly change my mind to a happier thought otherwise I'll end up down a rabbit hole lol.

I remember being about 12 or so, sitting on a bench in Hyde Park realising I'd probably die without meeting everyone in the world... . Later revised this... blew my mind knowing that I'd die not even having met a fraction of one percent of all the people alive!

Watching extensive documentaries of the Japanese tsunami about ten years ago really affected me. Seeing helicopter views of trucks speeding down the motorway being overtaken by horizon to horizon moving black wall of water and debris, that was many times higher than them.

I've watched Hollywood disaster movies as though they were mindless entertainment aimed at someone with the mental age of a primary school child. Suddenly I understood at an emotional level that world-ending disasters really can and do happen. We really are like ants running around busily, oblivious to the fact some large event might wipe us all out in an instant.

@MuchTooTired

A weird one I realised the other day is that people I see whilst out and about have whole actual lives. There’s a woman I see on the school run, every school day I drive past her in the morning, we smile at each other, then do the same in the afternoon. I saw her the other day in b&q and it completely threw me - it wasn’t a school day and she was there with her mum and blanked me.

Obviously I know everyone I see has a whole life just like I do, but it made me think about how many people there are, with lives that I know nothing about all over the world. I guess I’ve not matured past the kid in school who doesn’t realise the teacher doesn’t live there permanently until the next school day

This. I have this realisation often and it's very weird. I also often think about my own existence. That I was born as me, in this body and wondering what the world looks like from inside another person's body or mind. Also wonder what I look like to other people as opposed to just what I see in the mirror or in photos. I've always had a weird feeling when seeing myself in videos like "oh, that's what I look like from the back"

Love this thread! I’m always pondering many of these types of things. It blows my mind that when you step outside a building you’re just on the surface of a big ball of hot rock and all that’s “above” you is a bit of gas and then unimaginable amounts of space, and stars gazillions of miles away that you can actually see.

Also how little we know about how everything works. We know how gravity and forces work enough to make rockets and building work and so on, but not what anything actually is - gravity, time, matter, consciousness, existence.

And then I wonder why it is that we have a consciousness that can comprehend that our own existence or the material of our universe doesn’t make sense. How does that work?

When I was a child/teenager I used to really scare myself thinking like this but as I’ve got older I’m not so scared, just baffled.

As for tides, they are even weirder than that. It’s not just one hump under the moon, it’s two (as there are roughly two high tides in 24h) - one opposite the moon. This is because of the way the earth/moon system swings around - the centre of the spin is not the middle of the earth, but slightly off it, so the earth swings around a bit as well and opposite the moon the water bulges out because of centrifugal force. The two bulges match. However, it’s not the same water in the bulges - the bulges stay still but the water doesn’t, it rises up and down as it moves past the bulge.

@Dogsinpajamas

The number of events all happening which led to me having my dd. We were travelling last week in a different part of the country and passed a big company and I told her I used to know someone who worked there, and they got me into my sport which led to me meeting DH. That blew my mind but then I realised the randomness of me knowing the friend because I’d gone on a certain holiday, then the number of people between that friend and the club I eventually met dh at was huge, and if I hadn’t met even one of them DD wouldn’t exist.

This for me too...

I frequently think that had I gone to the original uni I'd said yes to... London Uni... I'd have never met DH, as I ended up at a completely different place 200 miles away!

And that people will do everything possible to keep me alive when I'm dying. Like why?

I’ve often wondered that, especially when I saw two family members suffering terribly yet being kept alive for the sake of a few more months.
I am dreading this but there is nothing one can do to prevent it.

I do remember the moment I realised that people think in other languages. I wasn't as young as you'd hope

And the idea of being the last person alive that speaks a particular language isn't something I can think about too much. Such an incredibly lonely concept.

I knew a 103 year old lady and before she passed I was amazed how her heart had been beating for over one hundred years,no break,no rest,over one hundred years of beating and keeping her alive. I just stopped dead in mid-chat at the realisation of it and she asked if I was ok. I miss you Mary.❤️

Money.

Like, I understand it at an economical level, but it’s more the operational side from the perspective of an ordinary person.

I have money but I’ve never seen it. It’s a number in my banking app that goes up and down. If I send some of those numbers to another account, that person sees their numbers going up.

I spend a lot of time working so the numbers can go up. And when I’m not working, I seem to spend my time making them go down.

I walk into a cafe and staff smile at me and they make me a coffee and I give them some of my numbers, a small amount of which goes directly to them.

The numbers in my bank account now would mean I could live like royalty if I had that amount two generations ago; my parents bought their first home for less than I take home in wages in a week.

And there’s just more money. Over the years, more is created but it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just numbers on a screen, but different numbers on different screens.

Sometimes I look at the number (or a note) and think about how wars have started over money, people have been murdered, women have been abused, decisions have been made- all to increase that little number on the screen.

You can invest in hedge funds and basically bet on how much something will be worth. It’s a job done by respectable people in nice suits and nice offices.
You can bet on a horse, that’s not as respectable.

We’ll complain that it’s difficult for people to get a foot on the housing market, and that rents are insanely high, but so many people have pension schemes linked to private equity businesses which buy up these properties for their investors (ie, us).

We don’t work in offices- we’re maintaining someone’s property portfolio and creating demand. Us being there is driving up the price we have to pay.

We’re not breeding babies, we’re breeding consumers.

(And yes, I know that the number/money in the bank equates to a tangible asset and can purchase things like houses and medicine but it all just seems so far removed from what money was compared to what it is now).

@IamtheDevilsAvocado and @Dogsinpajamas DH and I often think about that. Both sets of parents are from Londoner but moved out to buy a house and have children. We met at work but our parents lived near each other in London.

And yes about other people’s lives. Not just that everyone has a totally different experience of life from the viewpoint of being inside themselves, but that at any moment everyone I’ve ever met, who’s still living, is out there doing something right now - picking up some shopping, scratching their nose, throwing a ball, eating, going to bed etc etc.

My ex is another who couldn’t grasp that people exist outside the part they play in his experiences. I mean technically he knows this but cannot get why anyone has a different view from him or has changed when he sees them.

When I lived in London I had a sudden realisation that I was almost never more than 10-20 metres from another person even if I couldn't see or hear them. The only exception that I could think of was going through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel at a quiet time, that's the only time I could be sure that there wasn't anyone near me if I couldn't see anyone, even then there might have been a boat passing above me.

I can't take thinking you deeply about the universe... it freaks me out! None if it makes sense and we humans think we know it all but we really don't. Like what was there before the Big Bang.

What's struck me most lately is how disgustingly greedy western living is. I went to Oxford street and was bowed over by the quantity of fast disposable, almost identical fast fashion shops there are. We can buy whatever we want when we want it. We don't care about the energy or waste that goes into making this stuff or exploitation of other people. Then there's the food waste. We can get whatever we want when we want it. Strawberries all year - flown in for example.

No amount of recycling or turning my lights off is going to save the planet. We need to fundamentally change the way we live.

That this could all be a simulation and we are all NPCs

What happens to us when we die? I know there are theories/religions/ believing in nothing but what actually HAPPENS? Nobody can 100% prove an afterlife or not. Think of all the millions of people who've lived, and we still don't really know.

Its the inevitableness of it that freaks me out, at some point death will come and it's a scary unknown.