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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Dubious_Fart @lemmy.ml

What is the one most astonishingly dumb things that, as a child, you believed was absolute truth?

I dont remember the age, but it was before Kindergarten, thought men came into the house at night to load the next days shows into the TV.

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  • If you cut your own hair, it won't grow back. That was a lie my mum told me (after I experimented with the scissors). I believed her for years because there was a gap in my hairline. Eventually I realised "how would the hair know who cut it?" The gap in my hairline was just my parting.

    I believed LCD screens in digital watches were made of mercury (they were silver after all), which I knew was toxic. I thought that if you touched the display directly, you'd die. One day, I'd disassembled a cheap watch to see how it worked - I took everything apart back then, eventually I got good at putting them back together again. Drove my parents mad, but these days they always have something for me to fix whenever I go round.
    Anyway, I had this watch in pieces, handling the innards like an IED, but disaster! I brushed the back of the screen with a fingertip.

    I was dead. It was just a matter of time. I didn't cry or run for help, nothing could be done, I was resigned to my fate.
    After about an hour of continued existence I began to doubt my assumptions. It dawned on me that something so frighteningly lethal wouldn't be simply handed to children with nothing but a cheap, press fit case! That said this was in the 80s, and back the I also believed it was both safe and fun to help demolish an asbestos cement outbuilding by jumping on the sheets to smash them into little pieces. That one might still get me, we'll see.

  • When I learned balls have a significant role in child-making my first though was women got pregnant by surgically transfering a man's testicle to their belly. Then I realized balls come in two's and I do in fact have more than one sibling

  • If you stir chocolate milk counter-clockwise you can separate the milk and chocolate syrup.

    In order to learn how to whistle you had to eat enough pickles first.

    Found a rock that kind of looked like a coin and thought I could carve it into a passable counterfeit and repeat enough times to become rich.

  • I thought that when you peed, your pee would go to a place where it was manually boiled on a stove, making it 100% clean drinking water, and then when you turned on the tap, they would get a garden hose and pour water into the pipe that gave you water. Somehow I assumed this all would be done manually with normal sized stoves and kettles, and that each tap had it's very own pipe.

    I also thought that black people were just tanned, because colder countries had white people and warmer ones had black or brown people. Then I asked myself: why are there black people in cold places? I came to the conclusion that all the black kids in my kindergarten would eventually lose their tan and become white.

  • When I was a kid and McDonald's started to became a thing here I was scared that Ronald McDonald would be at the restaurant. When I was invited to a birthday party and the parents wanted to take us to McDonald's I refused to go inside and the dad had to wait with me on the parking lot until my parents picked me up. I also figured that he could potentially be at Burger King, so I never went there either.

  • I thought that everywhere was ocean except our town, my grandparents' town, and the interstate we used to get there.

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