Raised conservative christian, took a disgustingly long time to lose some of my shittier takes
I recently saw a shirt for sale online that says, “I’m sorry for everything I said when I was evangelical,” and that really just about sums it up.
Same. Lost a very good friend because I was too slow to change, lost my family because I did.
I’m sorry friend 🫂
Don’t beat yourself up. Seriously.
I was able to break free early partly due to how absurd the hypocrisy became. My mother was going to hell, not because she’s a cold narcissist, but a Jew and a ‘practitioner’ of new age bullshit. And my father saw nothing at all wrong with this type of belief.
Not to mention he was pretty racist (though in a ‘subtle’ way), while helping raise my adopted Korean sister.
I was lucky that he and my mother were such atrociously bad examples of how to deal with others, that I vowed to never be like them.
I didn’t figure my way out until I was in my 30s. Been out of it for over a decade.
I was brainwashed, my head was full of carefully crafted indoctrination. My extended family will almost certainly never be free of it.
We were subjected to an evil process from an early age. It’s not our fault. Losing the hate and guilt is also a process. Go easy on yourself. Takes a tough person to change their entire worldview. Only a few of us make it out.
That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, “If you play too many video games, they’ll melt your brain like your dad” or “why would anyone pay you that much” when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn’t normal and I didn’t have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.
I haven’t spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.
Some parents forget to support your goals when it’s not in-line with their goals for you; despite probably having the same childhood.
Always be looking for the opportunity to forgive them if it should appear. Not before, but be ready in case they clue-in.
Being Mormon.
They always told us that people who gave us anti-mormon literature just made stuff up and it was Satan’s way of tempting us. They said to never take any anti-mormon literature and if someone did give it to you then to throw it away without reading.
But at the same time they taught us that the Mormon church was the true church. And they also taught us truth was absolute. Well, i figured if truth is absolute, and if the church was THE true church then it would be able to withstand any criticism. So i read anti mormon literature, like the CES letter. From there i did my own research about various things and found that the Mormon church made up a lot of stuff and did lots of gaslighting.
There was some specific issues that i also had been struggling with, like their treatment of women, gays, and black men/women. That also helped push me to want to make sure if the Mormon church was really true. And it wasn’t. Now i can love my friends unconditionally.
Good on you for challenging beliefs and forming your own opinions. Not easy to pull yourself out of these things.
Good for you because morning Mormons are batshit.
For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who’s good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.
There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.
A large majority of that is winning the luck lottery of which family you were born into. Most people who have “trouble staying afloat” are also those who are economically disadvantaged… as in, in the lower-90% of the economic population who are desperately just treading water. Most of the people who “breeze through life” have the intergenerational family wealth that permits this behaviour.
Yes, that has also been my experience. But this also evens out fairly well with age. I’ve come across very well put together people in their 50s and 60s whose childhood all the way through late adulthood has been literal hell. But this might be survivorship bias.
So you’re telling me we can’t just steal a baby from one of those secluded amazon tribes and force them to learn the quadratic formula so I don’t have to? there go my weekend plans :(
As a non American who has never been to the US, but grew up well within its sphere of cultural influence.
I thought that about half of the population was black, maybe 40% minimum. I was surprised to learn that it was just above 10% in reality.
They tend to be concentrated in a few areas. There was one place I lived where none of the dudes living there had ever even seen a white dude in person other than cops and social workers.
That if you weren’t part of “our” religion (my family’s religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are
It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That’s how my parents brought me up, for which I’m still very grateful to them today. It’s good to hear that you’ve found your own path, which certainly wasn’t easy. Respect, my friend.
Three of my cousins are sisters in the same family. All three are vegans, just one of them militant.
While we enjoy the two happy vegans and their great families and their joy at sharing their chosen lifestyle, we get no judgement from them; unlike the militant sister who reminds us we’re all going to a kind of hell on earth of our own making and we deserve to be sick for eating creature-flesh, etc.
Your comment reminds me that beliefs other than religious can be used by over-eager proselytists to judge and belittle people. And yeah, she’s so off my friends list.
I was wrong about who I was for several years. A pretty unexpectedly intense DMT trip set me right
EDIT: This isn’t really the ideal place to elaborate on my experience, but thanks for the interest.
Care to elaborate?
They’ve remembered they are DB Cooper
I knew it!
Details?
I thought I’d live a comfortable stable life pursuing the sciences for the sake of knowledge. I learned in the past year or two through studying political economy and climate science that this is pretty unlikely. These days idk what to do. I want to do something more useful, I want to help people but it all feels quite hopeless. It often feels like revolution is the only option but I fear it may even be too late for that. We are already past the point where hundreds of millions will die and be displaced. We are already past the point of inevitable severe famine and societal collapse in many places. We aren’t even accomplishing damage control and it feels like most people don’t even dare acknowledge it.
Just go into a high paying field, and move somewhere that won’t be affected as badly. The apocalypse is BYOB, so start prepping.
If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.
You are vastly underestimating what will happen if we allow things to continue as they are. We are already at the point of severe famine and 100’s of millions dying and global emissions have continued to increase at essentially the same rate as before every year. Every day that we do nothing the list of dead grows longer. If I were to do nothing but watch then I would consider myself complicit. I think the worst part is that we all know exactly who is responsible but still somehow do nothing about it. I’m genuinely honestly shocked that we don’t see them all as the mass murderers they are. This cannot be a sane world.
Despite this, I do appreciate the condolences.
It often feels like revolution is the only option
Well, first of all, that’s never gonna happen.
But more importantly, the boring shit is working. China’s greenhouse gas emissions probably peaked this year. The US peaked ages ago. The world isn’t far behind china. Taxes on fossil fuels and investments in renewables will see us through this. By 2026 at the latest, every year will see decreasing global emissions.
Well I’m afraid to say there were a couple revolutions. Maybe you need to check your history book.
Username checks out
Thinking the words, “just calm down” in the heat of an argument with my wife will actually work if I just try it enough times. Mathematically it should but it seems math doesn’t care about that.
My gorgeous wife’s ginger hair and flashing green eyes warned me off that tactic early on. And I’m alive to tell the tale.
Yes, I’m still learning that. Also giving emotional support instead of trying to fix everything instantly is difficult.
I was certain that a gander was a group of geese. Why? Because apparently everybody who has ever used the phrase “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” around me was using it wrong. I just learned this week that a gander is a male goose. So based on misuse, I thought that the phrase meant that what’s beneficial for one is beneficial for the greater group, but what it really means is that what’s acceptable in the case for one should be equally acceptable for others in the same situation.
I’m nearly 36 and I would say that I’m smarter than most people, but this was a gaping hole in my knowledge that was pretty damn humbling to learn of and correct.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gaggle” still works
Oh wtf, this one got me.
Is this just a “happy wife, happy life” variation?
No, it’s more like “if Larry gets a 10% grade reduction for turning his paper in a day late to you, then I shouldn’t be getting this 20% grade reduction for turning this paper in a day late to you.” It’s more of a call for things to be fair and give everybody equal treatment.
There was a recent court decision regarding Donald Trump that, more or less, appointing a special counsel for the purposes of DOJ impartiality is not constitutionally acceptable. As a result, Hunter Biden, who was investigated and prosecuted via special counsel in order to maintain impartiality from the DOJ since his father is the sitting president, essentially argued that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Meaning that if Donald Trump should have his case dismissed under the pretext of special counsel being an invalid idea, then so too should Hunter Biden. That decision was already generally seen as fucking silly, but the silliness was put on full display for partisan hacks and their audience.
I learned that in school, when we read a story about a proper gander.
Well, I just learned something.
deleted by creator
Rinsing after brushing teeth. The fluoride in the toothpaste should stay on your teeth for a while to be effective. So you should floss, then brush, and wait to rinse or not rinse
I learned last year that you’re supposed to floss BEFORE you brush. I have no idea why no one ever taught me that.
Yeah you loosen up every thing and then brush it out. Actually, I floss, swish, then brush. I end with brush because the fluoride concentration in toothpaste is much much higher than in most fluoride mouthwash. I’d rather leave that on my teeth after I’m done.
I floss, rinse, then brush. The fluoride content of toothpaste is much higher than rinse, so I’d rather end having that on my teeth than a weaker dose from the rinse.
I’m referring to rinsing w water or even drinking water
deleted by creator
That’s only true in England, because they don’t flourinate their water. In the US, you get plenty of flouride from tap water.
I thought libertarians were cool. Then I learned about the “fiscally conservative “ parts.
Throw back to when I was young and naive and considered myself an “independent” who argued both sides. Then I found out who the real snowflakes were
My dyslexic ass read librarian and for a whole minute I was confused why this should be connected to reading and sorting books professionally.
Libertarianism is only viable if you have the ability to effectively evaluate every option you were presented with, so as to maximize your benefit.
Unfortunately, this excludes the lower-90% of the population. Only the top-10% are wealthy enough to afford the mental headspace to do this.
There is a lot of merits to left libertarianism (social anarchy) that I would put into the “ideal” category.
The longest was probably the vegetarian → vegan pipeline.
My position was that ‘employment’ of animals was humanely possible, if you genuinely treated them like you’d want to be treated.It was until I read how cows need to basically be kept continuously pregnant, that I realized there was just no way.
I believe, you could have a bite of cheese every year or so, if we don’t do forceful impregnation, but at that point, why even bother?I mean maybe eggs, if allowed to roam and given their shells back. But modern chickens are just absolutely genetically ravaged by centuries of breeding for absurd egg output and massive growth.
Before domestication they’d lay about a dozen a year. Now they lay once a day or so.
Chickens always gave a lot of eggs. That’s why they were popular since ancient times. As long as they had surplus food, they start laying eggs. A dozen a year is just misinformation - that’s only in the wild, during spring because that’s when they have a surplus a food. If humans feed them every day, then they lay eggs because they always have extra food.
We raised free roaming wild chickens. The hens had a high up coop we’d close to keep safe from predators that they’d return to on their own at night.
A dozen a year is just misinformation - that’s only in the wild,
That’s likely true, but I also have serious doubts that a chicken completely untouched by human breeding would output like the breeds bred to lay even if given unlimited food. I also doubt their bodies are made for such production.
They still lay about 24 eggs a month, sometimes more sometimes less depending on the temperature and if there’s a rooster around. Again, we had the wild breed of chicken (Gallus gallus). We also had guinea fowl and ducks.
It’s an animal that can reproduce a lot. Don’t know why people find that hard to believe but don’t bat an eye at the reproduction rates of rabbits.
The US government stores over a billion pounds of cheese in enormous caves. I think we can probably get away with reducing production quite a bit.
I want to go there. with crackers.
I thought Brussels sprouts were baby cabbages until I was 28 and I finally saw them still attached to the stalk.
As a kid I would hear “save big money” and would often show a person next to oversized money (like cartoon people next to giant dollars and coins).
I was absolutely under the impression it meant large scale money and found it confusing anyone would want that. It would be so inconvenient!
I’m not sure when I figured it out but it wasn’t an “a-ha!” moment, it just sort of gradually fell out of my brainmeat.
I thought Menard’s slogan was “save big bunny at Menard’s”.
The first time I went to one was around Easter, so they had bunny-themed stuff around. And the store’s speakers were shit, so it was hard to understand the ad spots playing over them.
I wasn’t sure why Big Bunny was in trouble, or what it would take to save him, but I wasn’t too worried.
Eventually, I saw a commercial for it and figured out I had misheard it. I still like my version better though.
