Animals have such a wonderful thing as a conditioned reflex - a mechanism for remembering positive or negative (mostly) conditions in certain situations. Birds remember not to fly into fields where there is a scarecrow, a cat understands where its tray is, a dog knows perfectly well who feeds it and who walks with it... You can give endless examples, but there is one exception in the world of living beings. Yes, that's right - people.
In fact, our consciousness is both a great blessing and a great source of various problems. After all, no matter what conditioned reflex a person develops, we can always overcome it if we really want something. And often we play havoc with ourselves, stepping on the same rake over and over again.
We convince ourselves that this time we will definitely win at the casino, that we are used to unloved and not very well-paid jobs, that the charismatic and spectacular politician will keep all of their numerous and generous campaign promises... We believe again and again, we are wrong again and again - but very rarely do we draw the right conclusions from our own mistakes.
Recently, a true viral thread appeared in the AskReddit community, the topic starter of which asked people just one question: "What's 100% a scam but we accepted it in our society?" As of today, there are already exactly 35K upvotes and more than 34.1K of a wide variety of comments, from really serious and vital ones to jokes as well, but still fully answering the original question.
Bored Panda has compiled for you this selection of the most popular, sometimes unexpected, sometimes instructive and anyway incredibly interesting viewpoints from the original thread, so please feel free to scroll to the very end of it, upvote the ideas you support most and of course add your own - and who knows, maybe this list could become really helpful for someone.
More info: Reddit
#2
America’s tipping culture. The fact that businesses have put the burden on consumers to pay their employees livable wages is a joke
134points
#5
Paying hundred of dollars per month for health insurance and then insurance not paying for anything until you’ve hit your deductible (usually thousands of dollars per year) and then after hitting your deductible insurance only paying for a certain percentage of your care until the end of the year until your deductible resets and you pay out of pocket all over again until you hit the deductible and even after hitting the deductible your insurance is fighting tooth and nail not to cover anything.
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120points
#8
That it’s considered normal to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding/ring/bachelor party
112points
#9
Mum "influencers" using their kids as bait to advertise products. Absolutely despicable.
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104points
#12
Not as accepted as it was but the idea that alcohol is safer than other illegal or recently legalized substances
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89points
#14
Justice System.
Crimes are punished unequally. Whether it's because of how laws are written, socioeconomic background, judicial discretion, DA's refusing to prosecute, or ect.
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75points
#15
The right (or refused right) to repair. Absolute b******t that i cant fix my own s**t.
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72points
#18
TurboTax. They lobby the government to make it difficult to do taxes without their software. I lived in the UK and it took literally 15 min to do taxes on bad government software
62points
