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

I thought adults actually knew what the hell they were doing.

I thought that when the clerk at the checkout asked, "would you like cash back?" That you could say yes and they would just give you cash straight out of the register for nothing lol.

I figured that most people were very honest and didn't need the money, so they would just say no thanks and leave it in the register for somebody who really did need it.

So many things...

I didn't understand how lie detectors were supposed to work so I thought you could hook someone up and ask something like "does god exist" and you'd be able to get answers to all of life's big mysteries.

I thought there was a left and right sock

I thought wolverines were mythical creatures

I thought if I tried hard enough I could somehow become older than my older brother like it was just a title or something

Thanks to DARE any time I saw a skittle with the S missing I thought it was drugs even in a newly opened package

I could go on..

I remember thinking that women gave birth to girls and men gave birth to boys, and being really worried because I (as a guy) didn't want to give birth.

I thought CEOs worked super hard

My dad told me that walnuts were owl eggs.

He got in trouble when I stole all the walnuts in the house and wrapped them in nose tissues to keep them warm so they would hatch and I would have baby owls.

I was trying to figure out what caused wind. I noticed the leaves moving when the wind blew, and I knew that a fan (handheld) also moved wind. So it stood to reason that trees moved causing the leaves to move which caused the wind. And naturally it must be earthquakes that caused the tree to love. And then I thought, we’ll there must be a master tree that started the wind, and the most “logical” place for that tree would be the North Pole.

So, that there was a tree on the North Pole that caused all the wind.

That sheep and goats were same species. I thought sheep were the girl versions and goats were the boys, like hens and roosters.

Wasn't until well into my 20s that I finally ran into something that put the spotlight on it... IIRC it was some Farmville type of videogame, which included males and females of both sheep and goats. To me, that stood out the same way a "female bull" or "male cow" would have, so I had a little chuckle at the obvious 'oversight'. Realized shortly after that I was, in fact, a fucking idiot.

That adult humans knew what they were doing and had things in hand.

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I thought cats were female and dogs were male. Can you tell I didn't have pets growing up?

I thought black and what television was black and white because history happened in black and white. I suppose that means life in colour happened after the invention of colour tv

I believed until I was 8 or so that beans were a type of meat. When I learned the truth, I had an argument with my older brother with me saying something along the line, "You're gonna feel real dumb when Mom says I'm right."

When I was five or six, I think I must have dreamed that my dad could turn his head around 360 degrees. A few days later I was in the car with my Dad and asked him if he could really turn his head around. He responded "not now, I'm driving." I took that as a yes. It was years before I realized the truth...

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If you were cold then you would catch a cold.

You had to wait an hour after eating because if you swam after eating then you would sink.

Carrots will allow me to see in the dark if I eat enough of them.

If you did a bad thing then the universe would make a bad thing happen to you.

If you dropped food on the ground and picked it up quick enough it didn't have germs.

Grew up on a dairy goat farm. I noticed we ate most of the boys and kept all the girls.

I was so scared; I had to ask my mom which one of me and my brothers were they gonna keep.

There was a coca cola plant in my hometown. When we were kids, my dad used to tell us that the huge water tanks that were painted as coke and sprite cans actually contained soda and I always imagined diving in them. Obviously he was just fucking with us, but I actually believed it for a while.

The USA was the good guys.

That me parents didn't have parents growing up. It somehow never dawned on me until I was like 7 that my grandparents were their parents, despite knowing my grandparents all my life.

I thought peas were little unborn animals. Because they had a "cocoon". Refused to eat peas for years.

NSFW warning. I thought sex had to be anal. Just by the looks, it was impossible that a penis could pass through a vulva, and poop made it evident that it could pass through the rectum.

OP, that thing you used to believe is disturbing as fuck.

I remember asking my dad if the Earth ever got heavier besides when meteors landed and babies were born.

I couldn’t comprehend that babies were made out of food. I thought they just came from nothing.

When I was a little kid and went to a store with my father, the registry had a ton of small coins and I assumed the guy behind the counter was super rich, because my dad had 5 or 6 coins in his wallet, and the guy had hundreds of coins. When my dad asked for change, and got a bunch of coins, I assumed the man was very generous and donated his money to my dad.

That your tongue is divided into segments which each can only taste certain flavors

Homer Simpson wrote The Odyssey. I didn't know about any other Homer 🤷‍♂️

Adults act mature and rationally

I used to believe in God, that was super stupid looking back.

Learned about cremation before I learned about death. Thought we all were burned alive at the end.

Believed this until I was like 16 and so did everyone else in our school.

A girl did anal and got pregnant and since it was anal that got her pregnant she was gonna poop out the baby. Funny thing is I was part of the group conversation that started this rumor and STILL we all believed it. 😭

Actors have to be married to kiss on screen

That you could catch pneumonia from breathing in steam from the shower as I heard that a symptom is water in the lungs. A friend's dad died of pneumonia and I had to shower with my head stuck out of the curtain.

That other people would do what is right and protect me from abuse, as a child and as an adult.

That the legal system will protect innocent people, punish the guilty and ensure justice is done.

That other people are higher-thinking and moral.

I used to think "euthanasia" was a country.

I thought that cars were powered by the jet propulsion coming from the exhaust pipe.

I thought when my mom said she would drop things off at Goodwill, she meant a giant, hollow wooden wheel full of tumbling clothing called Good Wheel. I imagined it looked a lot like a water wheel at a mill.

Because radio stations' DJs would say "and here's artist with song name", I firmly believed that one of two things must be true:

Radio stations had the bands always playing live for them

And/or

Radio stations would present a local DJ, but they would then tune in to the artist playing the track live for a larger station

What's even funnier about this is that my dad has at the time taught me how to use a tape deck to record radio and CDs to tape. So I clearly understood recording mediums. Just, the idea still lingered in my mind for a while.

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.

That boogers were bugs that flew up my nose and died.

Though I wasn't actually raised religiously, just the prevalence of religion in society led to many of my early theories have religious components.

I thought that between dying and being reborn you spent your time in heaven as an angel. While there, you could select your next parents from all the currently pregnant people on earth. I imagined giant 'rooms' full of computers in heaven, where every pregnant woman had a profile you could check out (mind, that was in the early 90s - I like to think I secretly invented social networking^^). Once you decided on a mother, you'd be kicked down into her womb and be reborn. I did realize pretty soon after that this theory doesn't hold water when you see that many children are not born into happy families, but for a short while I was certain I picked my mother from all the possible mothers around the world. She was very charmed by that :D

I thought vaginas were just hiding 20-30 tiny miniature penises inside, and that's why they couldn't use urinals because it would spray everywhere

Also, that all cats were girls and all dogs were boys.

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

I thought superheroes were real and all lived in New York. To be fair, it was my only contact with Western culture.

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.

I thought that during commercial breaks the characters in the show I was watching were still doing things and I was missing it because the commercials were not pausing the show in the background but playing over top of it.

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 the abbreviation for pounds (lbs) stood for "lullables."

I have no idea why.

That America was good and a positive force in the world

That sun and moon switch places during day and night. Like in a cartoon.

Girls pee out of their butts.

When I was young, my mom told me that Dad went to work too make money. In my head, I had envisioned him going to an office and running machines that made coins. Imagine my disappointment when I got to visit him at work and there were no coin making machines.

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.

I remember watching Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. I remember that I thought he was wearing some sort of muscle prosthetics bc I thought people couldn't be that muscular. It's funny because by today's standards he wasn't buff at all.

That meritocracy exists.

Everyone in the whole world is the world champion of something. Could be something normal like running, or jumping, but it could also be something really niche like solving the Rubik’s cube with your tongue while being under water with your hands tied behind your back. You just need to find what you’re really good at and that might be your thing.

In Germany they put up mobil speed control and radio stations warn you about that. In German them doing this is called "blitzen" which is the same word as lightning. As a child I thought they were warning very precisely where lightning strikes were happening.

That God was real and had existed for all eternity.

That an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being created all of existence, knew everything that would ever happen and everything its creations would ever do, but still either doomed to damnation or lifted up to paradise each one of them as a result of them doing exactly what they'd been programmed to do

The world was in black and white shortly before I was born.

I thought Eleanor Roosevelt was Black. I have no idea how I got that idea and it stuck with me until partway through college.

Each video game copy was customized and knew exactly what you would try to do always.

Not from button inputs. That never crossed my mind. Literally thought it was some magical fake interactive movie and the wizards who made them accounted for everything and knew you better than you did.

Needless to say, learning about code and how you can make things read button inputs was a mind-blowing moment for me. I learned what the secret behind the magic was.

I have ever since then been far more curious on how and why things work. Learning about the methods behind the magics.

I thought that all languages were actually the same, just our ears differed. So e.g. as a native German speaker, I thought all people 'speak' German (I.e. make the sounds of the German language), but the translation of sounds into thoughts by the ears would only work when the source was 'my version' of the language. Very hard to put that into words, I just realize...

Another thing was that I had my own religious philosophy. I believed in reincarnation, and thought that all life was just a giant circle where you would be reborn as your own worst victim. Only when you have lived a victimless life, you would ascend into heaven. My go-to example back then was if you stepped onto a worm you will be reborn as a worm that is being stepped on. This one has horrible victim blaming implications when you think about it but in my childlike naivety I thought it was very fair.

There is a god who created the world and watches our every move and we as humans are fallen creations who can't live up to his super holy expectations with our sinful lives. But don't despair just yet because that holy god has set up a blood sacrifice solution involving his own son and all you have to do to not end up in eternal damnation is to believe in the blood magic of a god for which no evidence exists whatsoever outside of the ancient myths of primitive bronze age men - a god who chooses to remain hidden for some weird reason although he apparently wants to be worshipped and believed in. Easy right? Also, if your life isn't working out quite right for some reason, that's certainly your own fault because the lord's blessings are very dependent on you doing those very fuzzily defined Jesus-ing activities right and you're quite obviously doing something very wrong, have sins in your life, aren't believing hard enough, doing it with an impure heart or whatever...

You couldn't make this shit up if you tried!

I thought the priest at church was Jesus.

That night was caused by really thick clouds. I think I saw light through dark black clouds during twilight and assumed night was caused by black clouds covering the sky. I went to test this theory by flying out of London at night but I fell asleep before we took off.

I was a towhead, which means I was born blonde and it turned to brown as I got older. When I first started noticing my hair turning darker, I asked my mom why and she told me it was because I ate too much peanut butter. I stopped eating it for about a week until I decided that I loved peanut butter more than being a blonde.

Cows that are completely brown give chocolate milk.
My mother said it as a joke, but at the time it made complete sense to me. By logical extension, there must’ve been a farm with pink cows for the strawberry milk.

I thought that actors on TV shows and movies were acting in real time, and that they had a special ability to do the exact same thing over and over again.

As I grew in the Spanish speaking world, I also believed that Hollywood actors spoke Spanish, and that their voices changed dramatically only by switching languages.

I used to think that how your belly button looked was based on a surgical procedure following birth, and "innie" vs "outie" was an indication of a surgeon's skill. I was legitimately surprised when my son was born and you find out they clamp the umbilical cord and just wait for it to fall off.

That god was real and he actually gave a fuck about me

I started learning BASIC when I was 7 and used to think that the POKE command was a magical incantation that could do anything. Like you could make an entire game with a single POKE. You just had to find the right one.

I used to think all food for adults were called Sad Meals, as opposed to Happy Meals (like at McDonald's).

I thought some wild stuff as a child that feels more fantastical than strictly dumb. Like I thought everyone was psychic except me and could hear my thoughts. I thought time worked differently depending on who I talked with. I thought the earth was both flat or round depending on where you were standing. I'd often get dreams and reality confused too. For some reason I thought dogs were people who had been cursed into becoming pets, probably because of me seeing the donkeys from Pinocchio. I thought half of people were robots fueled by pieces of the sun they'd pluck out of the sky.

This one is common, but I thought water simply phased through your body if you touched it. There was an episode of Bill Nye where he mentions that water "goes through your hand" and says it just like that. So I thought water simply phased through hands.

I think I was just abused as a kid and neglected

I remember reading a Robin Hood book when I was maybe 6 years old, and it mentioned that Robin Hood hated 'bloodshed.' I thought this was an actual shed or something where people went to fight. I hadn't learned the other meanings of 'shed' yet.

There was a brief moment where I thought video games had to program every possible combination of pixels so it could react appropriately to what I was doing at any given time in a game. I had no idea how things rendered. I didn't know they were individual sprites that animated separately. Thought it was all just one big thing and they had to draw every single possibility with nothing dynamic going on.

Then I played Wolfenstein 3D on PC and realized how impossible that would be in 3D. Funnily enough, those little pocket games they had in the 80s and 90s like Game & Watch kinda were doing exactly what I thought every game was doing, but they were much simpler games for a reason.

I thought the people in movies lived in the video cassettes. I would only watch a video every once a while cause I didn't want to get them tired and or take them away from their families.

Was like 9 when I realized I was wrong. Lol.

Cliffs were fictional. Like the kind you can fall off of.

Professional wrestling was real

Other than organized religion, you mean?

Probably that cops are benevolent keepers of the peace and that putting humans in cages decreases crime.

I was assured that power-hungry politicians would face checks and balances, and get voted out for saying insane things.

I earnestly believed that quicksand was going to be a far more prevalent danger in my life than it has.

I thought every video game CPU was a real person playing that game with you

god

I live in Ontario and Quebec was undergoing a referendum to leave Canada when I was a kid. I asked my Dad if Canada would still be the second biggest country if Quebec left.

He was impressed by the insightful question, but in reality I thought Quebec was just the tiny town where my Grandma lived.

That if I went to Planet Hollywood for dinner I would definitely meet Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Because of Barbie dolls, I used to believe that girls didn't have nipples

Step dad convinced me that those chocolate oranges were natural from a chocolate orange tree..

I thought answering machines were something just made up by TV shows because we never had an answering machine.

My mom told us that microwaves are bad for our health due to radiation. I did not want a microwave in my own apartment until I was 20 and my GF just got one.

If I had to pee really bad I would eat bread or crackers because it would absorb the pee and not make me have to go.

I thought the world used to be black and white and turned to color sometimes in the early 60's. Ironically that's about the same time color TV came into prominence.

When I was little, I used to think that before I was born (1977), people and the world in general were in black and white. All the photos I had of my family before my birth were in black and white.

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I noticed there was always a gust of wind after cars passed, so I concluded wind was caused by invisible cars driving by. Storms were caused by the invisible drivers driving too fast.

I used to go outside during storms and yell at them to slow down. I was convinced it was working.

My mother used to tell me that the jehovas witnesses had like a blacklist of households that they are forbiden from knocking on their doors since their inhabitants are unsalvable (and are going to hell according to the list but mom didnt say that) and that the peerequisits of being added to the list was not opening the door when they came to pester our house hold.

We laughed a lot about this until one day i bring it up back again and shes like "what are you talking about m8?, Theres no such thing, i made that up, i cant believe you belived that was a thing." And then she started laughing at me and made fun of that the whole day but like in a good way.

Parents told me if I could get salt on a birds tail I'd be able to catch it.

Pretty sure they told me that shit to at least increase the challenge of actually catching birds so I didn't try to bring one in.

That my parents were people I could trust.

When I was little people said dogs would sniff you to figure out who you are. I thought when a dog smells you they know your name, address, ...

And maybe they do?

that adults are trustworthy

I thought that there was one guy named Michael J---son who used his fame as an NBA star to launch a career as pop singer, radically changing his appearance in the process. I don't think I realized they were different people until high school.

I thought vampires were real so I never slept with my back to the door for years thinking they'd bite me in my neck whilwt I slept.

That the WWF was real

That eggs are made in factories. I still haven't made peace with this, and lurk around egg equivalents (I'm not vegan).

Also when I was in kindergarden, I had terrible idea about how the map of our village looks like.

I learned how planes work before cars, so since faster cars always had more exhaust pipes than slower cars I presumed the concept of thrust was similar to a jet engine and had no idea that the wheels themselves were powered until I mentioned it when I was like 6-7.

I used to think Parkinson's disease was named after TV chat show host Michael Parkinson.

Santa, Easter bunny, tooth fairy, god, etc

i thought that pregnancy was caused when a man and a woman slept in the same bed. the "seed" left the man in the night and went inside of the woman under its own volition. i understood the general ideas of sexual reproduction (i knew that a sperm had to get in an egg and so on) but had no concept of the mechanics of how it happened

My grandmother told me that lightning is attracted to hair so I wouldn't go out during storms which I loved.

I thought that cars are only able to drive on the street and was baffled when we saw an offroad rally on the TV

Demons are real and they live inside your computer delivering your emails and internet. Before computers they used to screw around with physicists and mathematians and break their theories but now they're too busy to do that anymore.

Not religious in the slightest, my dad just saw me asking what Beastie on his BSD machine's screensaver was and decided to fuck with me when he realised I didn't know what a demon (in any sense of the word) was

I used to think all adults were 10 years old. I mean, 10 is a large number right?

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Two things: counting using the last "0" number before going on to another decade (ie. ...18,19,10,20...28,29,20,30) and that credit cards have unlimited money lol

That women are attracted to nice guys.

It’s 97% untrue.

Not saying they are attracted to jerks either - in fact my overwhelming impression is that women despise those too (some exceptions exist of course).

Just saying that however equality has come, and should still come, attraction exists at a lower level. And at that level, someone who can hold their own, push their way through and be kind about it, will always attract more women than the “nice guy”.

Before you react - I’ve been together with my wife 17 years, we have four kids and I’m not some kind of player.

Just stating that I was brought up to believe women always prefer nice guys. And in retrospect I can see that I was brought up by a well meaning parents (mother, my dad was in the navy so away a lot) who tried their best to make me “not an asshole”. They succeeded. But I wish my dad at some point had sat me down to tell me a few home truths about how the biology of attraction works.

All drains went directly to the ocean - no processing, no filtration, nothing.

I thought my mom pissed out of her ass

That Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler were the same person.

That there were Congressmen, SC Justices, and former Presidents that didn't belong in prison

the tv was operated by little men in the box who did the play. In fairness that was when I was very little

Humans are good

I thought the world didn't entirely suck. Ignorant little idiot, I was.

I thought there was a massive tape inside the radio, that had the radio station on, and that it was big enough that it didn't need to be changed out.

I thought the lyrics to Wham's Careless Whisper was "filthy feet and I got no river" for YEARS.

I used to think unicorns were real.

That's a good one! Do you have any idea how you came to believe that? An offhand comment from a parent?

White/black cows -> milk Brown cows -> chocolate milk

The philosophical musings of Vladimir Lenin.

The human heart is a single-celled organ.

Thanks, The Amazing Colossal Man

I thought that gypsy moth nests in trees were squirrel nests.

That there was this thing called justice, helping to make the world equitable, and that it didn't exist just in poetry and fiction, to satiate peoples need for it.

I used to think America was a democracy and a positive influence on the world.

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That there was a deity named god