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 thought CEOs worked super hard

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The philosophical musings of Vladimir Lenin.

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