People are sharing small pieces of common knowledge they learned way too late in life – 15 hysterically informative penny-drop moments

Saul Hutson. Updated December 15th, 2025

We all have blind spots in life. Some of them are more important than others. And some of them are definitely more embarrassing than others.

Thanks to a recent Reddit thread, a few brave souls have admitted things they took a long time to learn.

Redditor /u/Responsible_Bet_7179 asked:

What’s a piece of common knowledge that you genuinely learned embarrassingly late in life?

The responses were as hilarious as they were illuminating. It may have been too late for them, but it’s just in time for you.

Remember, it’s ok to ask. Don’t go through life not knowing where pickles come from. That’s no way to live.

‘My parents had never put me to bed as a child. I had no real idea that people changed into pyjamas for bed. Instead, I always slept in whatever clothes I was wearing after taking off my shoes. I didn’t realise this was odd until college.’
Educational-Place845

‘I thought an emu was a type of llama until I hit probably 30 years old.’
Elephant_chair

‘I’m born and raised in Canada, but have family in Port Huron, Michigan.

‘I grew up visiting them a few times per year, including some rural areas around Port Huron. About 30 minutes from Port Huron is a town called Yale. It has a population of about 1900 people. It’s kinda in the middle of nowhere. I remember seeing signs for Yale as we drove around this part of Michigan when I was a kid.

‘During a casual conversation with my husband last year, I found out that Yale, Michigan is not, as I had believed for my entire life, the location of the prestigious Yale University. I’m 36. I’ve been telling people my entire life my mum went to Yale. Turns out she went to the high school there.’
sit_of_doubting

‘I didn’t realise chipmunks were real animals.

‘I assumed they were mythical talking animals from Disney cartoons. I grew up in Brazil, then moved to Texas as a kid. My only exposure to chipmunks was Chip and Dale. I suppose I never really thought about it, until I was in college and visited a friend in North Carolina. We were walking around her college campus and a chipmunk crossed the sidewalk and the truth hit me like a brick wall. I still get teased about it years later.’
BrazilianRhapsody

‘As a kid in Norway I was often thinking about how unsuitable Japanese paper walls would be there, with our weather with rain and wind. I vividly imagined waking up after a rainstorm with a wet paper wall over me, thinking the weather in Japan must be incredibly stable and dry. I think I was in my teens before the penny dropped that these were internal walls.’
perpetual_stew

‘That the division symbol is just a blank fraction with dots replacing the numbers.’
Delution_

‘That narwhals actually do exist. Up until I was 22 years old, I thought that because narwhals were ‘the unicorns of the sea’, that meant they were also fictional and simply too cool to exist in real life.’
Stiggalicious

‘I was an adult when I found out that men and women have the same number of ribs. That’s what happens when you grow up in the bible belt.’
WaterDancingSparkles

‘It wasn’t until I was in college that I realised pickles were just cucumbers in some kind of special juice.’
JumboThornton

10.

‘That the bottles of apple juice strewn on the ground near traffic lights are actually piss.’
calypsodweller

11.

‘That a nightcap can just be any drink. I was so disappointed to learn not that long ago that no one can teach me to make one. I thought it was its own cocktail with its own recipe.’
shortcake42

12.

‘Snow is wet. I was raised in Los Angeles. We never did snow things. It looks fluffy on TV.’
Handbag_Lady

13.

‘That thunder is not made by clouds crashing into one another… In my defence, I’m not an idiot, my nana told me that’s what it was when I was a kid and it stuck in the back of my mind but I just never spent the time to think about it until I was well into my 20s and that was when it clicked.’
Z0OMIES

14.

‘I was in my 30s when I realised eggs get fertilised through chicken and rooster shenanigans. I thought the egg got laid and the rooster sat on it to put a baby bird in it.’
reserge11

15.

‘That tortilla chips were just fried cut up tortillas. I just never made the connection, one is circular and soft, the other is triangular and crunchy. Only until I saw them getting chopped up and thrown into the fryer, I was like ‘ohhhhhh.”
spicysashimi

Source r/AskReddit H/T Buzzfeed Image Pexels