Life isn't as simple as one may think. It's not always easy to take a step back and look at the big picture, but when there's over seven billion people on the planet, there's no way things are as cut and dry as they seem.
Everyone's experiences are different going through life. We may not be able to see the complexities it if we haven't lived it ourselves.
So we went to Reddit because we wanted to see what's not as simple as people think it is.
Redditor Queasy_Researcher_27 asked:
"What's not as simple as people think?"
There's never a bad time to learn something new, so keep reading to get a different perspective on life.
Driving a bus.
"Driving a bus. It's very tiring focusing on the road for up to 10 hours a day and having to look in the mirror every 5 to 8 seconds while making sure all your passengers are safe and well on top of try to work out what other motorists are gonna do in front and behind you."
"Really, driving in general should be like this but most people ignore most of these aspects and that's why we get accidents involving inattentive drivers."
"Thank you for taking your job seriously, though. An inattentive bus driver would be phenomenally dangerous."
- NFLinPDX
"I drove school buses for 5 years. And man I put up with some bs. I couldn't image a city/transit bus with strangers every day. I loved my bus babies, but they had days where my buttons were fully pushed."
"Stay safe and sane."
"I did it for 10 years and just had to quit 6 months ago. It's a shame spending that many years committed to a job where I finish up quitting because of the abuse."
Generational poverty.
"Getting out of poverty. Especially if you're born into it."
"This. Very few people who haven't experienced poverty, understand how systemic it is in keeping people trapped in it."
"Even grocery shopping while broke is hard....more money you have the easier it is to take advantage of the offers and weekly/daily deals."
"Its not even as simple as being poor. I think finding comfort in poor is a huge part of it."
"I was raised middle class. And being able to go out to a nice restaurant without worry was one of many luxuries that are now nostalgic to me. And even when my family dropped all support and I had to work up from nothing again, I was never comfortable until I was back there again."
"On the flip side, I have no idea what it would be like to be rich rich. Like designer clothes, fancy cars, knowing-the-right-people parties. There's a 'lane' of upper-middle class-rich that Is foreign to me and I have absolutely no desire to push or work to get to that. I wouldn't know what to do with it if I did."
"I'm not saying that those that grow up poor are stuck that way or don't know how to get out of it or anything like that, but there's something so damn nice about what-you-know. I can imagine if all you know is being broke AF it would be so much harder."
Mental health matters.
"Getting out of depression."
"'Just be happy.' Yeah Mom, I like being sad all the time..."
- SRTX_999
"'You're depressed? Why don't you just go ask for help?' - one of my psychology classmates."
JustMobsReddit
"chubby cat."
- Pakushy
"How to get out of depression in one easy step."
"Therapists hate him."
Relationships.
"Relationships! I thought it was simple. You love someone, they love you, that's all you need. Ohh how wrong I was haha."
"Welcome to the club. It's even worse when you have to give up before you even get a chance to truly love the person. You just have to go on with life knowing that you wanted to and were willing. So yeah, relationships, don't recommended those lol."
"Same. I could never understand why my friends would brake and then get back together with there a**hole ex's after what they made them go through until I was in my own relationship and had my own a**hole ex."
Moving on from relationships.
"Moving on, even when you want to."
"There are relationships I've moved past, but doubt I will ever truly 100% get over. Years of time, therapy, meditation, burying myself in my career, hitting the gym and getting in the best shape of my life and even now these people occupy more mental real estate and influence how I go about making decisions."
"Hey man that's natural, it's just what makes us human. As long as people can embrace that it is easier to understand and deal with."
"Relationships form the strongest memories, so it's natural for them to always be there and pop up when you least expect it."
Foreigners Explain Which Parts Of American Culture Seem Strange | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
"People are soo quick to say just 'move on' and 'leave them,' one of the thing I learned from a friendzone discussion several years ago is that its goddamm easy to keep someone invested in just enough so they still feel like they have a chance."
"There was a guy who was supposedly in 'relationship' with a girl for 4 years and only realized that he's got no chance when he stumbled up on her phone and he was marked as 'free desserts' in the contact list."
This effects the last two.
"Communication."
"None of us are ready to talk about this one bud."
"Learn English, it's super painful because it isn't consistent and [doesn't] make any sense most of the time (at least for a Spanish speaker)."
"It's worse for someone from a language like Russian, since you have to figure out what the hell an article is and how to use it (Slavic languages don't have them). My wife has been living in the US for 10 years and still routinely messes them up."
"There's also the inconsistency between when to add an S to a word. For nouns it's when they're plural. But for verbs it's when they're singular (third person)."
"And the TH sound can be very difficult for someone who is an adult to master, since vocal cords harden with age to your preferred language."
Entertainment creation.
"Making a movie, it takes hundreds of people to make a film and most of them actually put effort and care into the project."
"I went to a filmmaking summer camp for 2 weeks. While was SUPER fun, it took a lot of effort to put the movie together and I learned just how long it takes to really make a movie."
"Same goes for making games, hundreds of people sometimes who all care very much for the product they produce, however chewed up it gets by publishers."
- Caedis-6
Making friends as an adult.
"Making new friends as adults."
"Yeah this is me. When i was a kid I was just able to approach someone without thinking too much of it, I'd consider anyone I've talked to as a friend. Idk what age hit me when i realized that we're just acquaintances. Now I just can't go up to someone and make a conversation without an intention, and you also have to feel what that person is thinking. Maybe its just me overthinking this."
Living and surviving are not the same thing.
"That living is different from surviving."
"So which is more important, living or surviving?"
"I guess it's down to if you prefer quality or quantity."
"Well the whole argument is 'you need to survive to live, but you need to live to give that survival meaning.'"
"Then I guess we try to survive first and once we're good at that we start trying to live?"
"Kinda disagree. If life is so bleak that you're never 'living,' arguably merely surviving is only prolonging your suffering. Personally I also feel like my life isn't worth living since a long time ago, I just hadn't quit life because suicide is scary."
"I don't think life just becomes easy to live one day. We gotta try to make it easy. By finding little reasons or doing things that make it livable. It may never come to what we had expected from life, but it will be okay as long as we find reasons to live. I think trying to survive is also trying to live in some way."
"That gaining knowledge is not the same as being intelligent. You don't become intelligent when you gain knowledge, and you don't have to know a lot of things to be considered intelligent."
- Redditor
"What would you say makes a person intelligent?"
"I'd say their ability to solve problems. Either in understanding the problem or finding methods to solve it; or even understanding that they can't solve the problem and move on to something else."
"I'd call that absorbing information. Critical thinking and analysis is something else. And even then, I believe that there are people who are book smart and those who are street smart. Sometimes people have both but not always."
"An intelligent person is someone who is aware of how little they know and how big their own flaws are. The lower your intellect, the more you tend to overestimate your actual intelligence."
- Ikajo
Though these things are not as simple as they seem, we are all going through life together. At some point or another, we may find that we need to walk a mile in someone else's shoes to really understand the difficulty of the situation.
Variety is the spice of life. Without the difficulties and challenges that come along the way, life would be pretty boring.
Want to "know" more? Never miss another big, odd, funny, or heartbreaking moment again. Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
@cubswwww reply to @cspan/X
@DCBlindOwl reply to @cspan/X
@JulianaStratton/X
@HagemanforWY/X
