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When I learned about germs, how they’re everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surfaces, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.
I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth’s crust, mantle and core.
Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.
Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades. Fast forward to me now explaining to people on reddit what lava is, that it’s actually molten rock… there are a lot of people who have never thought about it, saw pictures of volcanoes and just accepted that they spit out “hot goo” and never thought deeper.
I wish I was kidding, but also… I wonder if it’s a simpler, more peaceful life when you don’t know how anything works. I was up at 2:00 AM with my brain whirring away, like every night.
I loved this story, thank you for sharing.
I think the people who sleep well at night are the ones that don’t care how anything works. Sometimes it’s ignorance, but often it’s just burnout, and worse sometimes it’s a complete lack of empathy for anything that isn’t themselves.
I guess there are two kinds of people because when I learned that splitting atoms causes a nuclear explosion, I got a craft knife and some sand from the garden and went to town on them trying to slice some atoms just right 👌
Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10…it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake…
If I’m to believe that second person didn’t misspeak, they had “mental breakdowns” with an “s”, so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.
They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.
(While chewing lettuce) “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Maybe after the first few mental breakdowns, they could have maybe just gone on the internet may be kind of like, I don’t know, learned more. So they were saying they were just so sure that they could accidentally split atoms and they didn’t question why there weren’t nuclear explosions going off at every restaurant hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Edit: /s for the simpletons below 👇
Ah yes, name calling. What a mature way to handle the situation.
You understand that there are a lot of people alive before the internet existed, right? And if this person is relating a story from their childhood, and they’re anywhere over like 35 years old, us old people couldn’t just “go on the internet”.
When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn’t want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn’t that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn’t last very long either, maybe a couple of months.
Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.
Just tell yourself they’d kill you if they had the chance, it’s a preemptive strike
New anxiety just dropped.
Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.
profoundly stupid
Hey, that was my favourite movie when it came out. I was sure Yahoo Serious was going to be a huge star.
I don’t equate “profoundly stupid” to “bad”. I enjoy a good stupid movie. I adore Hudson Hawk. I watch Ready Player One all the time in the background.
I remember being told “Atoms are always moving”, so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would “move out of the way.”
I also just read my husband this meme and he was like “Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts.”
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.
Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.
I mean… The chance of that happening is incredibly low, but… It’s not zero.
Have fun stressing out of cutting things. Any cut you make can be the one low chance cut when you accidentally split an atom. :)
It is zero. You split atoms all the time, thanks to the radioactive carbon-14 in our bodies, from nuclear testing.
A nuclear bomb goes off because a lot of atoms split all at once, which causes a whole lot more atoms to then split. But that requires a critical mass. It doesn’t just happen on its own.
What kid wants to eat salad?
