If I’m to believe that second person didn’t misspeak, they had “mental breakdowns” with an “s”, so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.
They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.
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Maybe after the first few mental breakdowns, they could have maybe just gone on the internet may be kind of like, I don’t know, learned more. So they were saying they were just so sure that they could accidentally split atoms and they didn’t question why there weren’t nuclear explosions going off at every restaurant hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Edit: /s for the simpletons below 👇
You understand that there are a lot of people alive before the internet existed, right? And if this person is relating a story from their childhood, and they’re anywhere over like 35 years old, us old people couldn’t just “go on the internet”.
Ah yes, name calling. What a mature way to handle the situation.
I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe
I guess you did not grow up with parents that forced you to clean up your plate before leaving the dinner table
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I loved this story, thank you for sharing.
I think the people who sleep well at night are the ones that don’t care how anything works. Sometimes it’s ignorance, but often it’s just burnout, and worse sometimes it’s a complete lack of empathy for anything that isn’t themselves.
Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.
profoundly stupid
Hey, that was my favourite movie when it came out. I was sure Yahoo Serious was going to be a huge star.
I don’t equate “profoundly stupid” to “bad”. I enjoy a good stupid movie. I adore Hudson Hawk. I watch Ready Player One all the time in the background.
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.
When I learned about germs, how they’re everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surface, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.
Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10…it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake…
NOO BILLL
WHYYY
EVAPORATES INTO ASH
New anxiety just dropped.
What kid wants to eat salad?
I remember being told “Atoms are always moving”, so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would “move out of the way.”
I also just read my husband this meme and he was like “Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts.”
When I was in kindergarten they showed us a cartoon with anthropomorphic teeth to try to encourage dental hygiene and those teeth scared me so much that I refused to brush my teeth for years and I ended up getting gum disease because of it.
Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.
Yep was super paranoid and anxious over misunderstandings now just super paranoid and anxious over worst case unlikely scenarios.
When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn’t want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn’t that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn’t last very long either, maybe a couple of months.
Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.
If you did manage to do this by random chance would you even notice? A single atom is pretty small. If you somehow split a random carbon atom in lettuce wouldn’t you get less than a Joule as long as it doesn’t somehow chain?






