I don’t know if this counts, but when I was little I’d go to friends houses, then later in high school to my first serious girlfriends house, and I remember their families were like… loving? I loved spending time with at my girlfriends house especially, hanging out with her Mom and her Dad even if my gf wasn’t there. They were so nice, and you could tell had genuine affection for their children (and to some degree, me). I miss you Mr. and Mrs. Miller!
Heh that was my experience too. But I grew up with a single parent who spent all his time working, so most people’s childhoods weren’t spent climbing 5 floors of scaffolding for fun
Met my partner and was astounded by her loving family
That’s me. I had no idea other families were affectionate and said crazy stuff like, “I love you.” My god, they even hug.
To this day I struggle with affection, even though I love it. If you touch me unexpectedly I’ll involuntarily flinch. I don’t mind, at all, but I still jerk and can’t help it.
I think my family was the same but I turned out cuddly, maybe the difference was the cats?
My brother-in-law grew up thinking everyone had three sets of grandparents. His mother’s parents were divorced and each remarried
I grew up thinking it was normal for grown men to be attracted to little girls. My mother had a habit of pointing out random men who just happened to be around and telling me they were staring at me/thinking about how beautiful I was/in love with my/trying to look up my skirt. The way she talked about it made it seem like it was a common, acceptable thing.
I hope things are better for you now x
Yeah, I realized as an adult that most grown men actually aren’t interested in kids.
My mother
…WAT…
What, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the fuck
I think she had undiagnosed mental issues, tbh.
So it wasn’t just my mom.
I really wonder where they got this from! Strangely enough, when I was a teen and actually starting to get inappropriate attention from men, she would never believe that it happened.
As a man, I was worried about that growing up, but the women I’m attracted to has aged with me. I’m friends with some women under 30 from the dog park, and I can appreciate they’re pretty but they also look like kids. I hope they meet nice guys around their age.
It was not your fault. <3
What in the fuck 🤮
holy crap I hope you got out of that situation quick, this should NOT be normalized
My heart breaks for you in this
I distanced myself from her after college. Her behavior was unacceptable in a lot of ways, and she wasn’t willing to change. Thanks for the kind words.
Physical abuse as a child.
Struggling not to act on my impulses all the time, doing foolish things before thinking and not being able to go more than a brief period without embarrassing myself. I thought everyone dealt with impulse control issues. Oh hey Adhd, nice to see you.
When I was much younger: that normal people could see much further than me.
One of my oldest memories is going into a McDonald’s for the first time with glasses; I stopped and read the entire menu, because I couldn’t believe normal people could read it as soon as you walked in. I always had to get up to the counter to make it out.
I got a lot better in school after that!
Child abuse. I thought it was normal to threaten children with violence for noncompliance. I thought it was normal to be afraid to misbehave or be suboptimal in school at the threat of violence.
Standing to wipe your ass
Reading.
Or rather, how so many people seem fear and avoid it, or can’t do it. Something like 21% of adults in the US are illiterate, and the majority – 54% – read at or below a 6th grade level.
I’ve been a sight reader probably since I was about six years old. I absolutely cannot look at any words legibly written in my native language and not understand them. You couldn’t force me to look at words written in English and not digest them if you held a gun to my head. I fear no wall of text, no matter how tall it is.
It takes some effort to wrap your head around the notion that not only can most people not do this, but statistically speaking most or at least a plurality of people have to struggle or exert conscious effort to read and many of them are loathe to do so. And roughly one in five people simply can’t. This did not sink in for me when I was younger.
I can’t imagine having to live my life that way. You nerds have seen how much bullshit I write in a day; I’d go absolutely bats.
Being unable to think of something without a prompt.
I guess most people can just remember things without sticky notes and calendars.
You can actually train for this!
You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.
You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.
Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).
You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.
Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)
What are you, an LLM?
I might be. Give me a topic and I’ll spew out all sorts of obscure trivia, but until you mention it, I don’t know that any of it exists.
Linux
In high school, my friend ran Linux. I was over at his house and he had to go take a shit or something, and I was trying to see what games he had on his computer. When he got back he asked what the hell I did because he now has to reboot, and we’re going to have to watch it do that for the next half hour. And penguins and hats.
That’s pretty much everything I ever needed to know about Linux.
Is that a challenge? Tell me what you know about Living Card Games without looking it up!
So, “Living” card games doesn’t mean anything to me, but you did trigger card games in general, which could take me a while. I’ve probably spent a majority of my waking life playing Magic, Poker, Hearthstone, Silver, Smash up, and various other card games. Most recently, I’m obsessed with Balatro.
That being said…
Are you about to open a Pandoras box by making me look up Living Card Games?
Mate, if you’re into CCGs, you really missed out by not getting into LCGs! Android:Netrunner, a remake of the original Netrunner from the 90s is the absolute GOAT CG out there with a close second being the Doomtown:Reloaded (which I helped design). Basically it was CGs without the luck/gambling. Just get all the cards and make exactly all the decks you want.
Unfortunately Netrunner and Doomtown run out of steam half a decade ago, but they’re still developed by their fans, but usually the only way to play them consistently is online in places such as Jinteki.net. There’s a few others still in production, but iirc they’re co-operative ones, like Arkham Horror
Lol I played Wizard 101 with my kids. I had the most amazing solo life/balance deck.
I was maining the most jank exile /chess deck you’ve ever seen. I called it homeless kasparov
I call myself mlm: mediocre language model
Hopefully not engaging in Multi Level Marketing
I teach you some words, and then you teach some words to your friends, and they teach some words to their friends…
AI trained on AI trained on AI trained on AI… Etc etc., quality degrading all the way down.
Genuinely. This is sadly how my memory works. It’s gotten better since I had a partner who I would talk to everyday with the inane question, “so how was your day?”
Then suddenly I had to learn how to summarize recent aspects of my life.
And then you’re like, “shit, that happened to me today? shouldn’t I be angry about that?”i have approximate knowledge of many things; accessing it without the right trigger may take a while though.
i know i know something but i have accepted that my brain will often only grant me access days later in a completely unrelated situation 🤷🏼♂️
You ADHD? I was almost 40 before I learned about inattentive type ADHD. As far as I knew, ADHD was spastic kids that couldn’t sit still. Since I was more of the daydream and fall asleep type, I never would have thought I was part of that crowd.
Pretty sure, yes.
I’m over 40 and i’ve had this and many other symptoms my entire life.
No official diagnose though; but this 160 questions-test for example says i’m pretty high up there: https://www.adxs.org/en
I’m also the daydream and fall asleep type ☺️
Undiagnosed adults club!
We are normal, it’s the others who are weird
Singing to me the song of my people. Where you all at?!
This is me to a large degree. Give me a cue and a whole encyclopedia is at your fingertips. Just say think of something and I’m at a loss.
Omg, this is me. I thought I was alone. I love all you people in this thread, FAM!
Same
Reading.
When I got to high school I started taking book out from the library there. Over three years I took out about a dozen books that had never been read; they’d just been sitting on the shelves for years.
When I was a kid I noticed most books hadn’t been checked out by more than 2 or 3 people. At one branch they’d just stamp the back inner cover of the paperback, no checkout slip and I asked “What happens when you run out of space to stamp?” and she just laughed sadly
Two things.
“How Can I Help You” by Laura Sims. Serial killer disguised as a small town librarian. Anyone how likes libraries will recognize and enjoy.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-can-i-help-you-laura-sims/19108763?ean=9780593543719&next=t
The other thing is that when you’re a reader you get a skewed view of the world. You hang out with other readers and talk about books, and grow up thinking that everyone knows who Sylvia Plath was.
spelling goto as one word.
The single-word version should be your go-to spelling.
Well, you should write readable code…
ya buddy?! Well you can just goto EOL
EDIT: I should probably premise this that EOL in this funny context is End-Of-Line, which is an old programming term. I’m not referring to End of Life.
GOTO 10
Lmao this was the first thought that came into my mind after reading the post 😅
It’s quite BASIC, really…
I will never live down the shame of using ‘wend’ in a conversation
Not being able to see anything when closing my eyes and not constantly hearing a voice in my head. I have aphantasia and thought people were always seeking metaphorically about seeing things in their head.
I only more recently learnt that people actually hear things as well as in like an internal monologue. To me, the whole thing sounds exhausting.
There’s a whole episode on that topic here
It is indeed exhausting! Warm regards, Joe(s)
Very exhausting, especially when your stupid brain makes you roleplay possible future conversations with people in your head all day. Difficult to focus and so exhausting
Oh, we can do that, just without the voice.
how can you think of words if not… thinking of the words? That’s really interesting
I am thinking of the words, I’m just not hearing them. Why would those be one and the same?
Oh, I have that as well, it’s just more like … data, I guess? I think sometimes what I wrote makes people think I have no imagination or creativity; I definitely do but it’s just different.
And then there’s people like me, who can make an audio-visual tour in their minds, see things in color, moving pictures, hear sound, feel touch.
Took me a long time to actually focus on mundane tasks and not doing them on autopilot.
I was 41 when I realised…
Think I have this. Only time I can really picture anything. At least above a part of a vague shape or higher resolution, is when I’ve recently woken up. Even then it’s a hit or miss. Wonder if it’s a wall to creativity.
Fwiw I suck at visual art but was a musician who at least made some money at it (all original music), and ran d&d campaigns and such.
What happens when you think? There’s not a voice? How about when you read?
In both cases, the words just… go straight from words to comprehension? It’s kind of hard to answer that question, because introspection of the process isn’t possible. I mean, I just look at words and know what they mean. From experience, I think I read about 3 times faster than most other people, what with not having to wait to hear them spoken by an internal voice. (Subtitles in the same language as the audio are maddening, because I can’t not read them, and then have to wait so long for the speech to catch up.)
You are assuming the internal voice is more of a presence. Its more the background exhaust of thinking. I don’t have to listen to my inner voice say it, as I read silently they just fall out the back of my head as I go.
I have the same experience including the thing with subtitles. What’s the connection between the no-internal-voice and the maddening subtitles?
Just that I read them so quickly, I’m ready for the show it movie to move on to the next scene, and have to wait for the dialog to catch up.
My inner monologue, is just a stream of words, it isn’t encumbered by a voice.
To me that sounds like “I just walk around without taking any steps.”
If you think that is strange, I can rotate 3D objects in my head but there are no images.
i can build concepts in my head, without words or images. And just put them down, ofc i fumble a bit, because i’m not perfect, but i intuitively and innately understand concepts. Just based on my experience with that particular thing, much like an LLM can spit out actual real grammar and words that make actual real sense when you ask it to.
I understand that.
Because I don’t need to tie it to a visual metaphor, a lot of complex concepts, especially math, I find quite easy.
it’s weird if you’re an aphant, because you adapt by just speaking outloud, and internally understanding things, the only real situation where it becomes problematic is when someone tries explaining it to you, because you’re on the other side of a cliff, basically.
Knee pain. Everyone told me it was normal growing pains, until one little league coach notice I run weird. Queue years of doctors and specialists and tests and scans and surgeries, and now I’m a 40 something guy with advanced arthritis that could have been much much worse if left untreated.
way to go attentive little league coach!
also wtf parents?
My parents took me to see doctors, who told them it was just growing pains and suggested I exercise more to lose weight. I saw three specialists and had a bunch of xrays before anyone noticed the shady spots on my cartilage. Osteochondritis Dissecans occurs in 15-30 people out of 100,000, and most of the primary care doctors I’ve had in my life had never heard of it.
I can’t blame my parents for that. I can blame them for a lot of things, but they did their best.
“Well it’s not hurting me so it can’t be that bad.”
I remember one day realizing it was odd that my dad would hug my mom but my mom would never hug him back. She would just stand there and let him hug her. Yeah he was an abusive husband and I was very happy for her when she finally left him after over a decade!
