What is common knowledge? Well, the definition is pretty much right there already: it's knowledge so basic, so straightforward, so common, that everyone is expected to possess it.
But there are bound to be gaps. We've all had the experience of learning about something embarrassingly late, and sometimes being called out for it. This r/AskReddit thread on common knowledge learned late in life is good for a few laughs. You might even learn something that you really ought to know already.
"I wish i didn't think sex was so important into my mid-late 20s. I wish someone told me that going out to bars and clubs wasn't all about hooking up. That the nights success isn't gauged on whether you met someone, got a phone number, made out or took someone home. I didn't even have any chick friends on my teens. Non of us in my group and other groups i knew had. Girls and guys were separate. I moved to France from Ireland and was so surprised that you could just be friends and hang out and have a good time. So much pressure growing up and such time wasted."
"I didn’t know there were 'Top/Bottom' tags on the insides of most bed sheets until I was 25 when my bf pointed it out to me. Before that, I had just picked a side I thought was shorter and hoped for the best, but I was usually wrong, lol."
"That your relationship with your parents, and the relationship between your parents will, if not examined, be the subconscious blueprint for your relationships too. Man, I wish I had examined my childhood better - I spent the better part of my 20s wondering why my relationships never worked out, and then started noticing the resemblance to the worst aspects of my childhood. A hard, but valuable lesson to start to recognise those [bad] childhood experiences reverberate so much stronger than you can imagine"
"No one really cares about you. I don't mean that in a bad way. But everyone is so busy thinking about themselves, you are always an after thought.
The most embarrassing thing in your life, probably doesn't matter than much to someone else."
"If you are really committed to making a relationship work, you have to stop worrying about who's right. Winning arguments just isn't important. Stop. Walk away, breathe. Ask yourself if who loaded the dishwasher more times last week is really worth arguing with someone you love over. I bet it's not but you may not think that way if you just lash out at any critical comment."
"You can preserve fresh vegetables by getting plastic containers and putting paper towels on the bottom and the top. it absorbs the water. It's the water from condensation that makes them go bad so fast. Then just change the paper towels every few days and wipe out the container. Makes them last WAY longer."
"Headaches, sluggishness, and crankiness are all signs of being hungry. I took medication that made me lose my appetite, and I am not very good at recognizing different types of hunger cues.
Feeling especially sad, anxious, or guilty late at night means I gotta go to bed. Didn't figure this out at all."
"Life can literally change forever in the next second, hour or day and that when people say to enjoy every moment of life as if it’s your last, it’s actually good advice to maintain a positive attitude and feel like you have no regrets."
"Bit late to this but a university lecturer once said 'Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent.'
Make sure you're learning the right way to do things as much as you can, because otherwise those bad habits will take longer to change."
"My husband is a paramedic and he gets so frustrated when folks are beating around the bush about what they took or take. Especially if it's someone who called to save a friend from an OD. Paramedics don't give af and wont tell the cops, tell them everything!"
"That you need to regularly check and top up the fluids in your car. I bought my first car at 16, a cheap old beater, and knew nothing about cars other than gas makes it go. Found out the hard way that it had other required fluids that I had neither checked nor filled. Broke down on the highway and [messed] up my engine."
"Upkeep on a modest sized single family home is a part to full time job in itself. I went from a condo to a place that is a little bit bigger, has a yard, a lawn with landscaping and needed to be modernized. It’s been quite the lesson learning how much time and effort you actually have to spend to keep the place in decent shape."
"The only accident I've ever been involved in was a couple weeks after my best friend very suddenly died, and I was averaging an hour of sleep a night. I don't even remember the accident itself, but I'm told I didn't even slow down. I just drove straight through a red light and got t-boned. I don't think I fell asleep at the wheel, but I was definitely out of it. Thank God everyone was okay, but both cars were totalled. Never driving when I'm that tired again."
"Sometimes regardless of how good a person you are, how hard you try, and how sincere you feel, there are people who will mistreat and take advantage of you. And more importantly them doing that usually isn’t your fault. It’s more often a product of who they are and wasn’t as personal or important of a choice for them as it will feel for you."
"When I worked a minimum wage job, I would work hard and not take breaks, do a great job, and always finish early. I just then got told to pick up the slack for the employees who spent their time goofing off. Never got a promotion, raise, or even a 'Hey, good job.'"
"Learned that when I was a social worker for 10 years & horribly abused by my bosses & clients. I work an office job now doing data entry & the younger employees find it odd that I save so many emails. I want proof of EVERYTHING so I can go back and point out SEE! You DID agree. It's saved me enough that people trust my credibility and will come to me first if there's confusion in anything."
"You can just buy towels and pillows. I thought they were handed down over the generations. I also thought pillows were naturally a dull brown and went looking for brown pillows.... until I realized mine were brown with body oil stains from 40-60 years of use."
"Just because I hold an opinion on something doesn't mean that I need to share it. I spent WAY too much of my early adulthood inserting my viewpoint into discussions that I wasn't really a part of."
"That whole thing about the can opener. I was like 48 when I found out how to do it.
For all my life, I held it to the side of the can. All jagged edges. Then some guy puts out a video about holding it on top of the can, boom, no edges…"
"There’s no rules to doing chores. You can make it more fun if you want to. For no reason I forgot that I could watch a tv show while I fold laundry and I didn’t have to just sit there and do it."
