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.

That your digestive system is essentially a hole that runs through your body. When you put food in, is it really inside your body? It's just traveling through a tube

Everyone is fighting their own battles

and

Nobody has a clue what they're doing!

That we look at people weirdly if they breastfed their 6 year old, but we as adults still drink breastmilk! - only even weirder - from a different species 🤢🤢🤢

It's actually incredibly cruel too- the newborn calves are removed permanently from the mother cows at just hours old so we can have the milk. Many are shot (males)

Grim.

@OhRiRi

That your digestive system is essentially a hole that runs through your body. When you put food in, is it really inside your body? It's just traveling through a tube

Yep...we're basically a skin donut!

m.youtube.com/watch?v=lPXWt2ESxVY

Sometimes I can’t listen to this. It’s too much! @Rebeccasmoonnecklace

@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.

When you look at it like that, the sharing one building, it means you could have all partied in lockdown. Boris would have said it's fine and so would all the people coming out to say he was right, if you're in the same building the rules don't apply to you.

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'm a language teacher and I think about this kind of thing a lot. It makes me happy when non-language-teachers think about it too!

I'm very in favour of dying languages being saved. A language is such a central part of the culture and character of the people who speak it. I suspect that people who don't think it's important to preserve languages a) are almost always native speakers of very mainstream languages like English, and couldn't ever imagine their own language disappearing and b) have not really thought (unlike you) about 'thinking in your own language' as a concept. Imagine if the language you had always had all your thoughts in were now considered dead and obsolete!

There are billions of people living in cultures and societies completely different than our own - with environments, customs, diets, and values that we find super “foreign” or weird. Because of the last 30/40 years of globalisation and the internet we understand that humans are similar in many fundamental respects all over the globe. But conversely, I think people have even less appreciation than in the past of how hugely our day to day experiences differ. Pick ten people at random across the planet, and there’s a good chance a few of them will like a song by Taylor Swift/Adele and have seen Titanic. But that’s often where the similarities will end.

@Terfydactyl
This just freaked me out. I had never even thought about how tides work. Properly weird feeling going on inside me now.

If the water thing freaks you out, how about the fact that our bodies are mostly water?

People always scoff at me when I suggest the different stages of the moon affect our moods, but when I suggest that the moon is controlling all the water on the planet, therefore it must affect our bodies, minds tend to get a bit blown!

@mrziggycoco Love that you think this! As if all the world leaders are working towards a global goal rather than self-interest of each country Whatever helps you sleep at night

WeOnlyTalkAboutBruno
That the people in charge don’t have a fucking clue.

When I was younger I used to walk around safe in the knowledge that while things can get bad, they will only reach a certain level of bad before “those in charge” will step in and fix it.

Not so.

mrziggycoco
Nah it's not that. They have a clue. They're working towards a global goal they don't announce at every turn is all. What you believed was that the people in power had integrity and cared about our wellbeing.

A person who is born completely blind will never know what real life looks like. Will never know what a blue sky is, green grass etc

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.

Or, to put it another way... what's odd is that humanity has invented umpteen made-up stories about things that they'd like to think happen to us when we die (plus some things they wouldn't like to happen to them, but think should happen to other 'bad' people), when there is literally no reason or justification for thinking anything happens to us after we die, beyond what we can see happens to the body and the fact that consciousness stops!

But isn't blue (or red, green whatever) a distinct wavelength? So we will all see the same colour.

We could/do choose to label wavelengths of light with colour names, but I think colour itself is a concept manufactured in the brain, it's not a property of the "real world", it's merely an allusion to something in it. Just as two different people may not have the same experience/feelings about eating the same food, we can't say that two different people looking at the same wavelength experience it the same way.

The "real world" is unknown and unknowable, all we have is an idea of it created in our brain. This is of course somewhat shaped by what is out there, although most of our important knowledge of reality comes not from direct experience, but by a brain-washing process imposed on us by our elders, who pass down group knowledge via something called "education". So what we think of as reality is in many ways just a cultural construct.

Something mind-blowing I saw on Youtube recently is a scientist of some kind has proved that, in terms of perception, we are not adapted to see "reality" accurately/truthfully. Surprisingly, having you senses adapted to maximise accuracy of perception is not the same thing as having them adapted to see reality in ways that maximise your probability of survival.

The example he gave was this: imagine a world where oxygen varies from place to place, an organism needs oxygen levels in the range 19% to 22% to thrive. One organism see the colour green when oxygen levels are in the range 0% to 50%, and the colour red for the range 50% to 100%. Another organism see green for the range 19%-22% and red everywhere else. The first organism will have a better comprehension of reality, but will become extinct, because it will be out-competed by the one that knows exactly where it needs to go, even though it knows nothing about the rest of the world.

@WeOnlyTalkAboutBruno

That the people in charge don’t have a fucking clue.

When I was younger I used to walk around safe in the knowledge that while things can get bad, they will only reach a certain level of bad before “those in charge” will step in and fix it.

Not so.

Yep. This one hit me hard. Most people in charge are winging it most of the time.

@Fairislefandango my auntie moved to Austria as a young woman and obviously became fluent in German. As a young teenager I used to be fascinated in whether she thought in German or English after 20+ years. The answer? English!

Inter-species relationships are weird too. There are two animals living in my house - not even harmless ones but small hunting carnivores. They love me and comfort me if I’m sad, and sleep on, one actually in, my bed. I buy them food and clean out their toilet. It’s mad.

@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.

That I will never know how other people think, what their internal monologue is like or how they perceive the world? Are they all just winging it like I am?

Also what happens to other people when I can't see them anymore - it feels to me like they cease to exist but I know that can't possibly be true and they're all just going about their business like I am.

That I am here because numerous generations of people got together going back centuries.

That in a world of billions, people manage to meet people they are attracted to or fall in love with in their normal day to day lives.

That there was a time where I as a woman would have been regarded in law as a piece of property and and had very few rights and would probably have thought that was completely normal. (and how recent this was!)

How people who are from other countries must think in their native languages and how English might sound as unintelligible to them as say, French sounds to me.

Yes to drinking a cow’s breast milk. What are we doing that for ????? I’m off to buy soy milk.

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.

I had this thought a while ago (but about dogs and foxes). At the time I was with a young man with SEN and his explanation was brilliantly simple. He said, dogs are clever. They know what is a dog and what is not a dog exactly the same way that we do.
Boom!

For me, it was the realisation that my parents didn’t have all the answers and are sometimes wrong.

They’ve always laughed at my tendency to what they call ‘panic’ but I call being prepared. I’ve always, since living alone, kept a good stock of food, household goods, medication. I remember when we first got wind of covid, which was christmas time 2019, and I remember saying, this could impact the UK. Remember being called hyperbolic. Then went to a birthday dinner in the feb of 2020, and said similar - called ridiculous. One month later my parents didn’t have toilet roll or pasta. I bailed them out.

Lots of similar things, made me realise to that i didn’t need their approval to do things as well, which is still wild to me

Above was in reply to @partystress

That budgie smugglers have not been fashionable for a very long time.....centre parks holidays are hard work ,why do I look forward to them so much.

I often think we’re very like ants and that’s what a much bigger organism would see if they watched us. If someone is injured or dies, a team of others come along to collect them. If a building is damaged or collapses, but by bit teams of people carry out rescues, clear away the mess and rebuild. We transport food and waste along established routes and prioritise a leader in a special chamber. Individuals die but the colony persists.