50 Pieces Of Common Knowledge People Admit To Learning Embarrassingly Late In Life

Not knowing something can be embarrassing. Particularly when we know that we are sort of supposed to know it already. Depending on your age, you have perhaps had that feeling of still being a child “faking it” in an adult world, despite being in your mid-twenties. It’s simultaneously relieving and unnerving that most people in the developed world do not actually feel like adults until they are 29. It’s almost like we become adults at 18 and then need a decade testing it to decide if it’s a good fit. 

So even if all of one's peers still feel like overgrown children, people still suspect that most are just well-adjusted, and competent and know that pickles are just cucumbers. Or that doves are just white pigeons, which is so deeply shocking that those city trash birds and the symbol of peace are one and the same. But the bottom line is that we tend to project competence to others while overestimating it in them. 

Many of the examples are simply the age-old issue of hearing a word or phrase before reading it or vice versa. "Piqued my interest," for example, is correct, not "peaked." One would be forgiven for thinking it’s peaked, because in what other circumstances is someone saying piqued? Like many of the annoying parts of the English language, French is to blame. Piqued is simply a rendition of “pique,” meaning irritate or prick in French. From the outside, it seems silly to be judgmental towards a person for confusing a common word for a rare, foreign construction in an idiom.

Others shared deeper, more personal experiences. From relationships to self-worth, life is the only effective teacher. Many people end up staying in bad, toxic relationships, whether with a partner or just a bad friend group, for longer than they should, even when they recognize the toxicity of the situation. People only know what they know, which is endlessly circular logic and redundant, but remains ultimately true. If a person doesn’t know any better, they will continue to be around people who are just bad for them, since self-worth isn’t really a class one can take at school. 

Similar to the ignorance about pickles or thinking that one has to buy shoes and clothes to grow into as an adult, many people also feel embarrassed to admit that they are in a toxic relationship or friendship. We see our social circle as a reflection of ourselves, so admitting that they might be bad feels like telling everyone how dumb we are. Embarrassment is a particularly bad teacher since studies show that it doesn’t even create a drive to avoid similar behavior in the future. So it’s mostly your brain making you feel bad but refusing to build something useful out of it. The one upside is that embarrassment means you are more or less mentally normal, as a lack of embarrassment is a sign of psychopathy.

You can also take heart in the knowledge that, well, knowledge is growing a lot faster than any of us can actually process it. In the English language alone, there are between 500’000 and 1’000’000 books published every year. Even at the lowest estimate, you would need to read 1369.86 books a day to keep up. This equals roughly 57 books an hour. Even the most prolific Goodreads liars are not likely to think that is possible. More importantly, no one around you is reading 57 books an hour, much less just one. And if you want to read what embarrassingly obvious things others learned late in life, check out our other articles here and here.