What weird stuff do you think about? Don't be shy..

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not talking about your plans for world domination, weird sexual deviances, or where you might hide the body…

Just the random stuff that pops into your head. The kind of things you’d love to tell someone about… but can’t, because, you know… it’s a bit weird.

Here’s a few of mine…

1. Weird apocalyptic fantasy

When I was a kid, I used to imagine a scenario where I was the only person left on earth, except for this army that was hell bent on finding me. One day I’d imagine them to be in say, Sweden… another day, Japan… and sometimes if I felt particularly frisky, I’d imagine them to be passing through a nearby town, checking every house…

I still do this. I have no idea why. I’m 36.

2) Weirdness with Google Maps (part 1)

I do weird things while watching movies and shows online. Like noticing a cool landmark or place during a scene… then going to Google maps in an attempt to locate it… then either switching to 3D mode to get the same camera angle, or go to street view and ‘stand’ where the character stood in the scene.

I don’t know why I do this either. But I seem to find it fun.

3) Weirdness with Google Maps (part 2)

I once tried to ‘travel’ from east to west coast USA - by clicking the roads on street view. I hoped I could do a bit every day, and theorised it could be done quicker than a real car.

It was a failed attempt. I don’t tell people about this.

4) Weird 'this is all a computer simulation theory’

I view the world via a first person perspective. I’m looking out from inside my head. But how do I know you all do it too?

In other words… I think it’s quite plausible this is all a computer simulation.

5) Weird ‘what would happen if I…’ thoughts

Occasionally, when someone is talking to me, and I don’t really know them - think job interviews, first dates, flat viewings etc. I’ll have a random thought like ‘What would they do if I gently finger poked them in the head…’ then I’d actually imagine myself doing it.

Sometimes I giggle.

So what about you lot? Share your weirdness…

2

The design and manufacture of everyday stuff. Right now I’m sitting in the train, amazed at everything that surrounds me. Somebody manufactured the window I’m looking through. The fire extinguisher near the door. A whole load of people manufactured that thing. From it’s base materials 'til the design and color of the lettering on the outside. It’s got a label that tells me it was last checked five months ago. And that’s just a single thing here. Civilisation amazes me.

3

Same here. I see stuff and think about how it’s made. How the materials are made. How could I make it myself, and often how it could have been made in ancient times.

4

I have a fascination with hidden talents in people. I look at someone, man, woman, old, young, dirty, clean whatever and I try to imagine what special skills they have that have not been discovered. I imagine this dates back to my childhood and early adulthood where I always felt under valued.

5

I am in awe of some of the things that were turned out in ancient times without the use of machinery. Almost everything I do I compare to them and feel like what I do is child’s play.

6

Time travel is a theme in my thoughts. Into the past to change one tiny bit of my brother’s routine to save him from the auto accident. Into the future to set up my friend for the witty joke I want to play.
I am obviously not satisfied with the past or fearless enough for the future.

7

I think about elements of planned communities and civil architecture that may or may not already exist somewhere, like modular housing units, co-operative living, mass transit, improved utilities. It’s a habit that possibly originated at Disneyworld, way back when, but I’m not sure.

8

I was lying in bed this morning and I was thinking about how people drive cars.

I originally was thinking about stop signs and how they’re actually significantly bigger than most people think they are. And then I thought that the same thing is true about traffic lights and the dividing lines on highways; they’re all significantly bigger than we offhandedly think they are.

I was thinking this is unusual. We see these items on a regular basis. Why do we misjudge their size so much?

It occurred to me that these things have something in common; they’re things we look at when we’re driving a car. So I wondered if maybe there was a connection. Do we somehow look at things differently when we’re driving then we do when we’re walking?

I came up with a theory. We’re animals and we have animal instincts. Animals do not drive cars or operate vehicles. They run; they fly; they swim. Animals get around by moving their bodies. That’s how animal brains evolved. We move by being the moving object not by steering the moving object. We have no natural instinct to be able to drive a car.

But driving a car isn’t something you can do intentionally. If you have to think about what you’re doing, you’re going to crash. It has to be an unconscious skill you develop so you can do it automatically without thinking.

So we have to redirect a natural instinct. We have to take our natural instinct for running and use it to drive a car. And to do so, our brains pretend we are the car. When we’re driving down the highway, our brains are acting as if we’re running and we’re able to handle the motion that way. But this illusion creates a side-effect; we mentally rescale the things we’re seeing. By imaging we are the car, we’ve made our “self” three or four times bigger than we usually are. So we see other things as being three or four times smaller than they actually are.

9

While I read your post I started coming to the exact same conclusion as you. I was going to post almost the same thing you concluded. I think speed being scaled up would also be part of the equation here. I agree we become the car and the signs are relative to the size of the car.

10

Sometimes, when I’m pulling into (or out of) a tight parking space, it seems like I can “feel” where my front bumper is at, and exactly how far away it is from the other car. Even though I can’t actually see it.

11

I do a similar thing quite often when I’m walking somewhere that’s surrounded by nature, like in the woods, by a river, through fields etc.

I’ll pull out my phone, swipe the screen… then look around me, then back at the phone… and I’ll do this a few times before wondering…

‘How did this (phone) come from that (the environment)?’ Because it has. The trees, grass, dirt, rocks, water etc that you’re surrounded by, was once upon a time… IT. That was it. Before humans came along and started experimenting with what we found in nature… it was just nature.

Somehow we found a way to find things, to make things, that made many other things, that could produce the phone in my hand. But I’m just talking about the physical device…

Now it’s connecting to an invisible ‘thing’ in the air that somehow feeds it information.

How do you get a tree, some grass, bit of water, rocks, whatever… to do THAT?

It’s bonkers.

I’ve never noticed that before. But it could just be perception. Like, unless you already know this, I bet you’d be shocked to learn a basketball hoop is roughly twice the diameter of a basketball. It just doesn’t seem right… until you see one up close and realise how darn big those hoops are.

How can anyone miss?

12

I do something like that, too. For me, the key moment was looking out a car window at a fire hydrant and suddenly realizing that its existence implies the existence somewhere of a fire hydrant factory.

Along similar lines, I often find myself pondering how I would explain modern society to someone from the past. Most often, this someone is either an intelligent but nondescript person from the Roman Empire, or Sherlock Holmes.

And on a completely different note, I’ll occasionally look around my surroundings and come up with contingency plans for what I’d do if gravity were to suddenly reverse. Well, I could grab onto that window ledge and lower myself onto the ceiling… Never mind, of course, that if gravity did reverse, the window ledge and ceiling (and the rest of the house, and the ground it’s sitting on, and…) would also be falling up.

13

A sign maker told me people underestimate the size of anything up in the air. Just about any sign you see will appear smaller than it actually is. This may relate to the moon thing where it appears smaller the further above the horizon it appears. He also pointed out that people misjudge the size of boats in the water. When they’re on a trailer they may look huge but once you put them in the water they look a lot smaller. At least with boats there is a lot hidden below the water that you do see when it’s on a trailer.

14

I wonder about how many people created my every day life. I wake up in a house. How many people when into designing and building that house? I drink my morning tea. How many people were required to design, make, and get the cup, water, tea kettle, stove, and tea bag to me so I could use them. What about my toilet, shower, sink, soap, deodorant, etc. etc. etc.

Every day we come in contact with the work of billions of people. Think about it.

15

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble falling asleep, I play a mental game that I call: “Humans are ants”. First, I’ll imagine myself floating over my neighborhood looking down on the people interacting with each other. Then I’ll imagine myself over the entire city watching all the people. I keep scaling things up until I’ve got the whole planet in my view.

It’s amazing when you think about how interconnected we all are. While at the same time, this mental exercise does tend to make one feel a little insignificant.

16

If we had floating buoys with signs for the giant ocean liners I wonder how big the signs would be?

17

I sometimes think about things that could occur, but are extremely unlikely to do so. And then I come up with highly-detailed contingency plans for what I would do in such a case.

18

Being someone with OCD, my mind dwells on all kinds of thoughts about contaminants - chemical fumes getting sucked into the clothing dryer, possible unseen food or something rotting in some hidden corner (i.e., behind fridge, in between drawers,), possible scraping erosion of my washing machine rubber-and-metal components if the machine is making knocking noises, whether botulism or mold has been growing in food or water that has been left standing or unrefrigerated, whether the maintenance technician got nasty adhesive stuff on his hands from unscrewing the door of the HVAC (which is partly held in place by strong industrial adhesive) and if so, whether that sticky stuff got onto the door handles, etc.

I also have scripted movie scenes in my head for years and already know what kind of background soundtrack music I would want composed for them, and how the scenes would be acted out, etc.

19

After dealing with the lengthy illness and eventual death of my mother a couple of years ago, I think about death a lot. What would I do if I knew I was going to die soon, what would I do if my wife was going to die. And for the latter I have detailed plans of how I would try to cope, what exact steps I would take immediately after. I’m not a morose person, quite the opposite, I just assume it’s how I’m coping with the six years of stress from my mothers illness.

20

I often think about world affecting things, like what would happen if we scraped the top 1 mile of dirt from all the land mass on earth and sent it to the moon.