We’ve all been through it, being in a conversation when you offer a bit of information that makes the record scratch and the room go silent. Nothing is more embarrassing than finding out something you believed your whole life is not only wrong but also absolutely dumb as hell.
Maybe you were spared from this in adulthood but everyone has been through this at some point in their lives. One of my personal favorites was when my 30 something-year-old friends told me we had to catch that mouse in his house before it grew into a full-blown rat.
We’re not here to shame you for your silly misbeliefs (ponies are not baby horses, dumbass) but we are here to laugh at them.
Redditor u/Vinyl_BunBuns asked the question: “What’s the dumbest thing you actually believed?” and the people of Reddit did not disappoint.
Some of these answers I can actually relate to, because when your older brother tells you staying in the water long enough will make you grow gills behind your ears like Kevin Costner in Waterworld, you try your damnedest to stay in the water.
Here are the 30 most entertaining answers from people who were willing to admit they once believed something incredibly stupid.
1.
“When I was younger I thought that guys had commas because girls had periods.” –RepresentativeJoke98
2.
“I believed I could kill people with my hands when my fish died after I took it out of the water when I was four. So I never hugged or touched anyone until at school I poked a person I hated and he didn’t die.
Yes, I tried to murder him because he told on the teacher when I peed on the banana tree.” –NormalGuy2049
3.
“As a kid, I thought that the ‘World Wars’ were like battle royales where there were no alliances, no surrenders, and just pure bloody violence between every country on Earth (e.g. I thought every country fought all of its neighbors simultaneously) ” –Tiberius-the-Cuddler
4.
“That reindeer wasn’t an actual animal but specifically a mythical animal that Santa Claus used. I believed this until I was 23 or so when I saw some nature documentary talking about reindeer. I was like, ‘whaaaaaaaaat?'” –azzwhole
5.
“I thought that teachers lived at school.” –irishamerican
6.
“As a kid, my sister told me that we had an older brother that died. She said he died when playing bowling and his fingers didn’t come out the ball and slid all the way down the alley then he turned into a skittle.” –Hartsock91
7.
“Dogs = boys and cats = girls.
I don’t know, it made sense to me as a kid for some reason.” –-eDgAR-
8.
“I used to think that people exclusively wore hats if they were bald, because that’s why my dad wore a hat.” –Narniach
9.
“I believed, from old photos and old TV shows, that the whole world was once in black-and-white and one day it “switched” over to color, and all the old black and white TVs, except for the one in my grandfather’s kitchen, had switched over to color TVs too. My grandfather got a good chuckle out of it after I had explained my thinking.” –VictorBlimpmuscle
10.
“When I was little, I genuinely believed the Telly Tubbies were evil and that if I didn’t watch them on TV every night (even though I hated the show) that they would come and get me.
To be fair though they’re kind of creepy.” –SaltySaltFingers
