this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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I don't get it. I was never this stupid as a kid.
Edit: thank you for explaining to me that many of you were that stupid. I guess I never hung around any of you.
Ditto. I grew up helping fix VCR by replacing displaced bands and gears. I knew to be careful not the let the magic smoke come out. Bad genie!
Same, but I had classmates who were.
Are you sure? Kids are pretty stupid.
I never intentionally destroyed expensive electronics to "try to impress" anyone in real life, let alone online (although that didn't quite exist yet).
So, yeah, I'm sure.
When I was a kid schools didn't have expensive electronics to destroy. But we sure drew a ton of penises in expensive textbooks.
Those textbooks cost pennies. It's the licenses that were expensive.
My buddy stuck a paper clip in an electrical socket while we were in the cafeteria. Because his cousin had told him it would shoot sparks across the room. All it did was make him scream real loud, then the power to half of the cafeteria went out when the breaker blew.
Another friend “accidentally” stapled his homework to his hand, to try and get out of going to music class. Apparently his plan was to ham it up and go to the nurse instead. The teacher laughed, called him an idiot, and sent him to music class with a band-aid.
Kids have always been fucking stupid. The only difference is that now every kid has an internet-connected camera in their pocket, so their stupidity is more visible.
In second grade I remember a kid stapled his tongue lol
I used to be a teacher in the 2010s. I remember boys having this ghost pepper challenge they would do that would put them in literal tears.
I never stopped them. Some just have to learn through experience that being an idiot to impress your buds isn't going to result in a good time for you.
That’s, like, a normal logical one. It’s actually food, it’s spicy. It makes sense to compete to see who can handle the spicy food. This is independently invented every day.
Stealing faucets from public bathrooms? That’s not a normal logical one. That’s a devious lick, and something invented to be highly memetic and propelled by a highly optimized algorithm that incentivizes recency, novelty, and dopamine hacking. It even effectively had a brand name!
How about pooping on top of the toilet reservoir?
My kid calls it an "upper decker"
Eating a spicy pepper is just harmless fun. I'd join in that activity today.
You didn’t have the same social and monetary incentives TikTok provides.
I was pretty stupid
Some of my shenanigans definitely involved breaking electronics
I was. When the bell would ring and the halls were hectic I would put popcorn in the communal microwave and put like 20 min and leave and sometimes nobody would notice till it catches fire
I almost burned down the school a couple times
Hopefully you're less of a piece of shit now
Woah
Dude I was like 12 and severely bullied haha I'm a grown up now with a mortgage and a job
I feel you. I suppose a lot of people can't imagine what it was like.
Dude, Sounds like you were old enough to understand that almost burning down your school intentionally, multiple times, was bad. Bullies or not. I'm not sure why you're taken aback by someone thinking a little arsonist in training isn't a good kid.
IIRC constant abuse tends to 'reset' the brain to earlier points of development where there was no abuse as it attempts to find less painful behaviour patterns. This results in delayed development of certain areas of the brain; most notably the prefrontal cortex that is heavily involved with decision making and social behaviour but that isn't fully developed until one reaches ~25 years old so I don't know what you mean by "should be old enough to understand" because they clearly weren't physically capable of it.
Source is introductory psychology courses. One of my professors is a researcher in child development and worked a lot with kids like the person you're replying too. Treating them like "pieces of shit" just leads to more damage, so chill out.
It never burned down just ruined the microwave