As a kid, I was always skeptical of airplanes. Not as in having a fear of flying (which I actually loved), but as in wondering if they were actually, well, flying…
I imagined a scenario where rich flat-earthers and nationalist isolationists teamed up to create an entire industry of ultra realistic simulators, with hydraulics and centrifugal g-force simulators and high resolution parallax-tracking monitors where the “windows” would be. When you enter the plane and it starts taxiing, it actually engages simulator mode and docks with the centrifuge to slowly start the takeoff sensation, while a rendered video starts playing in the windows. By the time you actually “landed”, the airplane had actually just driven to the next fake town a few miles away. The world was just a collection of movie sets that people lived in, you see, kinda like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and airplanes were merely fancy taxis between them.
To this day I still can’t completely disprove that theory, and every time I fly I still look out the window and wonder if it’s all just a sim. Fortunately, I haven’t been crazy / brave enough to try to convince the airline staff of this yet… should I?
Anyway, what’s your personal far-out pet belief / hypothesis / delusion, one that you yourself recognize as strange?
Aside from believing the earth is a big head of a giant being we’re all living on. Like nits on a hairy head.
I just know that big monster is it----chy!!!
Raining was him taking a shower. Wind was him walking or running.
Us little human nits just hanging on as well as we can.
Well, I was a kid, unwanted and neglected, and tv was my only friend. So I watched all those sit-coms with kids with loving parents, a big group of great friends, and problems solved in 20 minutes. I actually believed life was like that, like a documentary, in 30 minute segments. Imagine my surprise when life turned out to NOT be like that…Like the poor women who sigh over Hallmark tv movies today. I hope they know it’s fantasy, not reality!
When I was a kid (read: under 10) I thought “prevent” meant exactly the opposite of what it meant. So, when I saw Smoky the Bear commercials saying only YOU can prevent forest fires I was confused. Why would he want people starting fires? At some point, I commented on that and my thoroughly confused parents had to ask some questions of me wondering what the heck I was on about. They corrected me, of course, and I have had it straight since.
As the youngest I really think my older brother or sister put that in my head but they deny doing it to this day. If not them I have no idea how I got that in my head.
I posted this a few years back somewhere around here:
When a couple are ready to own a house, they go looking for a suitable plot of land and then they call The House Builders and they come out and build the house your way to your specifications. When you need to move, you call The House Relocators who come and dismantle your house and move it to your second location. Then you call The House Builders again and they come out and re-assemble it. Repeat as necessary.
None of this explained why my folks’s house was so inadequate (their words) and poorly laid out. I figured they didn’t know what they were doing.
As a very young child, I also believed what was on TV was real. The Nelson family was on TV. I thought somebody knocked on their door one day and said “Your family is really funny. We’re going to put you on TV.” And there they were. Ditto for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. There were a lot of real people on TV in those early days, on game shows and whatnot, and it’s easy to see why kids might have thought a lot of it was real. My Mom explained it to me one day when I was about 5 or 6, and that ended that belief.
As a very little kid, I thought that Adolf Hitler had lived just across the street from our house. Let me explain: when I was around four, I hadn’t really a grasp how big the earth was, how my home town was different from my country (Germany), Europe or the world. For instance, visiting relatives in a 16 km distance felt to me like going to another planet. Being German, I was also early confronted with our nazi past and the figure of Hitler, so I asked my parents about him. They told me in a child-adequate way that he had been a very, very evil person, had started a war and killed a lot of people, so he became a reviled person to me. And somehow I thought he had lived in “the Quarry” (that was the name of the other side of our street because it was a housing district in a former quarry). As I got older, I better understood geography, distances and history, so that notion didn’t last long, but for a while I was worried about the evil man that had lived in our street.
When I was a tween, I became convinced that if someone stood directly in front of me, behind me, or next to me, they could hear my thoughts. (Diagonally close to me was okay). I think it started out “wouldn’t it be awful if that happened”, then became “I better make sure that couldn’t happen”, and progressed to “Step off, you mind-reading bastards!” As you can imagine, it started to get difficult to manage. At the same time, I was developing some other OCD shit like counting. Long story short, I realized my behaviors were making me miserable, and broke those habits.
I can’t think of any strong examples. As I child, I grew up with a mother who was a sort of wishy-washy Anglican (mostly for social reasons, I think) and an atheist father. So I suppose I absorbed the idea of ‘God’ for a while, but once I started studying science and thinking critically, that went away.
As a very young child, sleeping on a lumpy bed, I recall being afraid of things under the bed which would push up and poke me. They had hats which looked rather like the top of a manual orange juicer which they used to poke me with. They were called ‘loos’, for some reason…?
When I was a pre-schooler, I was terrified of spiders. They were so alien to me. I was convinced they could talk (or at least scream at me to heighten the terror) and even though I didn’t know the term “hive mind,” I was sure they telecommunicated so when one caught you in his web, the others knew to come a-running for a piece of small boy. If I had seen or read about Shelob at that time in my life, we would be having this discussion from a padded room.
Lots of people think that. Centrifugal force is a thing, which causes some confusion; but it actually tends to reduce the gravity on a planetary object rather than increase it. Some small asteroids spin so fast that they have negative gravity at the equator.
Walter Cronkite talked nightly about “gorilla warfare”. I thought there were apes roaming the jungles with guns. Made sense to me, you find gorillas in jungles and they could carry guns. I was about 8 years old.
Maybe this isn’t so much a weird belief as an opinion that turned out to be wildly wrong:
In the early days of the internet (1993-ish) I bought into the idea that the removal of “gatekeepers” would lead to a golden age of information in which sunshine would be the disinfectant. I thought, “Great, the KKK will have their own web site, they can publish all their absurd ideas and everyone will see how crazy and stupid they are.”
Similarly, in the early days of the internet, I was thinking that now the geeks or nerds were taking over and triumph above the jocks of the world and spread a liberal agenda. Now all those geeks have turned into tech bros, and I was spectacularly wrong.
While in kindergarten, I saw a Keebler Elf Cookie Tree display inside the vestibule of the Kroger supermarket at its grand opening. So I used to think cookies came from trees.
I was corrected in rather spectacular fashion when my teacher asked us for examples of things that grew on trees.
When I gave my answer, I was sent to sit in the corner.
Good catch.