Someone Asked “What Are You Certain Of, Right Down To Your Bones, Without Proof?” And 40 Folks Delivered

Not everyone is meant to raise a child. Just because you can biologically create a child or financially support one does not mean you are meant to raise one.

No matter what happens, no matter what I do or don’t do, no matter what I achieve or fail at: I know my dog will still love me and wag his tail when I get home.

That gardening is the secret to happiness.

Sounds super strange, especially coming from someone like myself - an ex world of Warcraft gamer. I had kids, got busy with work, wanted out of the suburbs, got some land in the country, and started planting stuff. Years later I have what I call a food forest. I have replaced lawns with fruit trees, bushes, vines, flowers, all woven together to mimic a natural forest - except everything in it is edible.

It has changed my life completely.

I just think there's something about being outside in the sun, feet on soil, hands in dirt, planting s***. Watching it grow in the background of your life. Going out and checking on it and watching how much bigger it is getting. Watching life find it, and now you get to live WITH the natural world, not isolated from it.

Birds making nests in your trees, frogs making home in your ponds, seeing bees all around your flowers, butterflies everywhere. Rabbits and squirrels moving in, then owls moving in to eat those. It's this wonderful trophic cascade that you started, and it's incredibly rewarding.

Plus, being able to just walk outside and get chemical-free nutrient-rich dinner is amazing.

I actually think a big reason depression is such a big thing these days is because we have all become so disconnected from the life that we evolved in for the last 6 million years. We evolved walking around savannahs and forests, pulling food off bushes and trees, out in the sun, feet in the soil, hands in the dirt. We couldn't be further from that, living inside our isolated homes, cars and offices. It's no wonder we're all so depressed.

I think gardening is the secret to happiness.

That there is other intelligent life in the universe. We may never encounter it, certainly not within any of our lifetimes, but it's out there somewhere. The universe is too goddamn big for us to be the only ones.

That the near complete absence of financial literacy education in American public schools is 100% on purpose.

That we would be happier if we returned to a more natural way of living rather than the 9-5 rat race.

Flat earthers are just doing it for attention. They really don't think the earth is flat.

If I'm stuck in traffic and switch lanes because the other lane looks like it will move faster, the lane I just switched from will automatically go faster.

Most company CEO's don't really know what they're doing. Whether their business thrives or fails has more to do with luck than anything else. There are exceptions, but most of them have a completely warped sense of their own "brilliance".

I'm quietly convinced I made a bestselling mystery novelist change the way he writes because I criticised him on Reddit.

The novelist in question is Chris Carter; the books are the Robert Hunter series. (Yes, the guy who has built a career on looking for serial killers is named Hunter. He works for the LAPD's Ultra-Violent Crime Unit. It's not a series that's overburdened by subtlety, is what I'm saying.) They are as schlocky a bunch of thrillers as you could ever hope to find, but for some reason I can't get enough of them, despite the fact that they're... very much not great. They lean pretty damn heavy on ridiculous tropes, and I've never seen a more Mary Sue lead than I have in this series, but the biggest complaint I have with them is that the same line appears almost literally word for word in the first nine books ('Hunter’s biggest passion was single malt Scotch whiskey, but unlike most, he knew how to appreciate its flavor and quality instead of simply getting drunk on it.'). I made a comment about it on Reddit on an r/books thread about your favourite terrible authors.

That post was made in January of 2019; in April, his book Hunting Evil came out, and the line was nowhere to be seen. I didn't think much of it until his new book, Written in Blood, came out a few days ago, and also didn't have the line in it. This comment is also one of the top answers if you google his name and the book series via Reddit -- exactly what you'd do if you were looking to see if people on the internet were talking about your books. I also can't find any evidence of anyone else pointing this out in a review or suchlike.

So yeah... in short, three months after I made that comment, he broke the habit of a decade of writing and finally decided that after nine stories that used this as a crutch for Hunter's personality, it was too much.

I know you're reading this, Chris. I know.

100 years from now only a handful of kids and grandkids will have any memory of my life.

200 years from now, at most I'll be a photo in an old family scrap book with my name in the margin space.

300 years from now no one in my family will know I existed outside of a half finished family tree.

Yet ultimately all of their hopes and pains, successes and failures, dreams and depressions will be the direct result of my having existed. So it isn't that bad.

The average middle class person of today has luxuries and a standard of living that far surpasses that of Kings and Queens from centuries ago.

1 in every 3 or 4 people is not capable of critical thinking. And I'm not making some kind of point about politics or anything - I mean those people are literally incapable of taking in information and synthesizing it with other information and coming to their own conclusions. They're basically robots programmed by whatever source is most convincing to them.

My phone is listening to me, it’s simply not a coincidence any more how my targeted ads change directly related to and after a conversation. People say we are just more predictable than we think but I mention something I haven’t even thought about for years and there it is on Instagram.

I don't care who you are or what you think, or even what the science says - Geese are evil creatures.

That a LOT more famous actors than we realize are secretly the children of other famous actors from the previous generation. I call it the Hollywood Bastard Theory.

Back when I was 10 there was a competition for schoolkids to write a treatment for an episode of Doctor Who, with the best one being developed into an full episode in the next series and the winner receiving a writing credit. I was a huge fan of DW at the time and the competition was actually run through schools, so my teacher made the entire class do it, but I was very excited.

I began writing a story about the Doctor landing on a planet full of defective cybermen, who's programming had gone a wry and had been left on this asylum planet to rot. The Doctor lands there in response to a mysterious distress call from a woman and attempts to find and save her while avoiding the dangerous dysfunctional cybermen and the looming threat of planetary destruction at the hands of the normal cybermen. I finished my short treatment and gave it to my teacher to submit. Unfortunately it turned out the competition was very strict about the formatting of submissions and mine was returned because I had used the wrong formatting in some way, it seemed like a weird reason. I was a bit disappointed and that was the end of that.

But then, a year or two later, there was an episode of DW called Asylum of the Daleks, which seemed incredibly similar to my story except with Daleks. So incredibly, eerily, similar in fact, that to this day I am absolutely convinced that Steven Moffat saw my script and came up with a formatting excuse so that he could remove me from the competition, steal my story, change the bad guys and claim it as his own. I have zero evidence, I don't even still have the treatment I wrote, or any letter from the BBC about my submission, and yet I know in my bones that Steven Moffat stole his script from 10 yr old me.

My cat knocked over the water glass on purpose.

That alien lifeforms will be nothing like we have ever imagined

There’s a travel agency that’s been around in my town for as long as I can remember. I wholeheartedly believe it’s a front for the mob.