reddit thread

If you're a natural overthinker whose anxiety borders on obsession, you've probably been the subject of ridicule among reckless loved ones who treat life like it's a damn toy. Well get ready for some major validation, because this thread of worrywarts is full of stories about all the times being an anxious overthinker actually paid off. Of course, we're not encouraging irrational 'what-if' thoughts that stem from anxiety, we just think that sometimes it's okay to trust your instincts, even when everyone around you thinks you're being ridiculous. 

It's not a great sign if a marriage is a big headache before it's even official. Redditor u/AITAemasculatormaybe asked the internet whether or not she was the a-hole for standing up for herself at a family dinner after her future mother-in-law called her a gold digger. Many indignant redditors in the thread agreed that OP was totally in the right. Hopefully this couple figured out how to set boundaries with the presumptuous in-laws. 

Depending on the generation you belong to, the way you think about the internet might significantly differ from someone much older or younger than you. One (presumably young) redditor asked the 'elders' of Reddit to explain the meaning of slang from the early internet days of yore. Not only did veterans of the net get into archaic terminology, they reminisced about messenger platforms like AIM and ICQ, illegally downloading songs, emoticons, forums and funny chat room dynamics. You can't help but detect a tinge of wistfulness in each response, even when one redditor recounts the traumatic experience of seeing 'goatse' for the first time. Keep scrolling for some amusing highlights from the thread. 

It's fairly common and perfectly normal to dream about past relationships once in a while. But what about someone who uses their lucid dreaming abilities to be in a full-blown relationship with an ex in their sleep? That's exactly what one guy did for years. Redditor u/intrepidreporter9 sought advice from r/relationships after confessing to his wife that he'd been living a double life in his dreams. Those replying in the thread had nothing encouraging to say—most couldn't blame his wife for wanting a divorce because he was guilty of emotional cheating. Have a look at the thread and judge for yourself. If you cheat in your dreams, do you cheat in real life?

How does YouTube know what we want to see? What even is the stock market? How is there no absolute position in space? Effing magnets—how do they work? We all have questions like these in the back of our minds—not urgent enough to google, but not mundane enough to forget. Well u/lliorca336 gave redditors a chance to open up about the various things in life they genuinely don't understand, and the responses are pretty interesting. Keep scrolling to see what people wonder about all day.

We've all seen that he's probably thinking about other girls meme. Well, turns out it's pretty accurate. When he's deeply zoning out, looking like he's off in some other world, it can make the significant other wonder. But most of the time, fellas are likely just fantasizing about having superhuman parkour skills, or taking a trip through some nonsensical stream of consciousness, or literally sitting there with a blank mind. Redditors of r/AskMen discussed the things they're often thinking about whenever their partners ask them, and the answers are surprisingly wholesome.

Some AskReddit threads are informative. They open peoples minds. They help to educate the ignorant, and heal the broken. Not this thread. This thread's greatest success is making us laugh out loud at our sad desks. This thread tackles the hard-hitting question of what naked sleepers would do when confronted with situations such as A) Fire and B) Burglary. It's not very deep. The question might even be unnecessary, but gosh darn if it ain't entertaining. 

A good neighbor strives to be both patient with others around them and receptive to reasonable criticism. If everyone in a neighborhood simply communicated with empathy and respect, its inhabitants would live in perfect harmony. But who are we kidding? This is not the kind of world we live in. In reality, human beings are very good at harboring resentment until it manifests in an explosion of petty conflict. But hey, at least sometimes the pettiness can be pretty entertaining for those gawking from the sidelines. r/PettyRevenge is a great place for anyone seeking that schadenfreude fix, and we've grabbed a satisfying story from redditor u/Your_acceptable, who taught their annoying neighbors a lesson with some good old fashioned pettiness. Others in the thread replied with tales of their own relatable grievances. 

Warning: discussions of poop ahead.

Food is an undeniable foundation of social relations. In every part of the world, friends and families bond through the sacred tradition of sharing a meal. Who doesn't love food? But social gatherings that revolve around eating aren't a walk in the park for everyone. There are millions of people who suffer from dietary restrictions, which often makes the social aspects of eating pretty awkward. And unfortunately, food allergies aren't taken seriously by everyone. Redditor u/IBgueSt is one of the poor souls out there who lives with a number of food intolerances, which both deny her the pleasure of eating a number of delicious foods, and make her subject to frequent awkward conversations about her gut problems. In this Reddit thread, u/IBgueSt recounts how one day, she'd had enough of her fiancé's family not taking her condition seriously. Rather than walk away from a family meal at the risk of seeming uptight, she instead indulged in food she knew she wouldn't be able to stomach and ended up teaching her future in-laws a smelly lesson in dietary allergies. Was she petty or in the right? The thread of replies that followed are full of hot takes.

Only masochists and the truly thick-skinned are brave enough to post their selfies to r/RoastMe, and even then, many regret the decision after experiencing burns so spicy, they develop new insecurities they never had before. We've got a handful of painful roasts people shared after one redditor asked r/RoastMe veterans which comments destroyed them the most. 

Is one's life just a series of random and chaotic events, or are there underlying patterns that determine the things that happen to us? In the late 1050s, Meteorologist Edward Lorenz was skeptical of linear statistical models of meteorology and pioneered weather and climate predictability through his discovery of deterministic chaos—the theory that though chaotic systems appear to be random, they contain underlying patterns and feedback loops which can be used to explain evidently unpredictable outcomes in weather. And so a small, seemingly inconsequential change to initial conditions can lead to significantly different results. In his 1963 paper entitled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, Lorenz claims that "two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states...If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible...In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent." Although Lorenz's deterministic chaos theory was focused on connecting cause and effect in weather to the general instability of Earth's atmosphere, the 'butterfly effect' metaphor has been used in different areas, such as quantum mechanics and (oftentimes incorrectly) in fiction. In Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, where time travel is a mundane reality and wealthy tourists can travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs for sport, one character is warned by his 'Time Safari' guides not to interfere with events from the past more than necessary, since small causes can snowball into catastrophic effects over time. At one point the character accidentally falls in the forest, but doesn't think much of it. When he returns to the present, he notices significant differences in the reality he once knew and eventually discovers a butterfly crushed under his shoe. The death of one butterfly millions of years ago had caused a catastrophic rift in time. Though this is a pretty outrageous interpretation of chaos theory, it's easy to go down a rabbit hole of wondering what other outcomes might have happened if seemingly minuscule changes to our own past life events were possible. In hindsight, it's easy to appreciate those random decisions that help us avoid disaster, but the implication that every decision you make potentially has a life or death outcome can drive anyone crazy.

We've got a bunch of examples of times people 'dodged a bullet' by making small decisions based on a feeling, or sometimes nothing at all. One person recounts the time they randomly decided to cancel a flight, which happened to be Malaysia Airlines flight 370. What at the time seemed like a mundane decision turned out to be a life-saving one. Not all of these anecdotes describe such dire mortal events—most of these stories are about the sort of times when you feel like you initially missed out on something good, but later realize you avoided an incredibly undesirable situation, like a job for a company that eventually goes out of business, or a date who ends up revealing themselves to be a psycho. You gotta wonder—were these people just lucky, or are there underlying patterns at play?

For the past several years, the media has dubbed Millennials the lazy, entitled, 'snowflake' generation who go around killing entire industries with their discriminating taste. Despite the fact that Millennials are now between the ages of 25 and 40, they still get blamed for things like Covid-19 super-spreader events on college campuses. With how generously the term gets used as a general pejorative, you'd think 'Millennial' could just mean 'youngish person who I don't like.' Well many are sick and tired of taking crap from out-of-touch people who seem to consider their own generation to be completely blameless. One redditor asked the internet to vent about the most annoying stereotypes about Millennials they've heard, and the replies are pretty spicy. If you're a disgruntled Millennial who's over all the slander, these top responses from the Reddit thread will probably resonate with you.

Picture this: It's several months into the global pandemic and the governor has decided to allow indoor dining again. You're considered one of the 'lucky ones' because you got to keep your minimum wage job as a server in a restaurant, and although taking to-go orders only has been pretty chill, the mountain of bills that looms over you everyday has you really missing those tips. Strangely, customers don't feel the need to tip if it's take-out, but they'll call you a hero as if you volunteer to be an 'essential worker' and don't actually have rent to pay. Although you've got a lot of qualms about serving customers again, you feel like you don't really have a choice. You reassure yourself that your customers will be respectful and follow social distancing rules. Maybe they'll even leave a decent tip—you're working in the middle of a health crisis, after all. You don't have the benefit of working safely from home, and any decent person will understand the risk you're taking, right? Oh how naive you are.

Your first customers arrive on the day of reopening and to your dismay, it's a group of ten and they're already drunk, masks hanging down under their noses. They immediately ignore the social distancing policy notices posted on every surface of the restaurant and start pushing tables together. They ignore your pleas to respect your coworkers and other patrons. Your manager doesn't help you. You're pissed off. After hours of rudeness and belligerence, finally the assh*le table asks for the bill. They spend another half hour drunkenly squabbling over the check before demanding that you split it ten ways. You somehow muster up the last bit of civility deep within you and smile through the rage. Finally, they leave. It's the moment you've been dreading. Again, you try and reassure yourself—surely they tipped at least 15%. They ordered bottomless margaritas. They stayed for five hours. Surely they tipped...You pick up the pile of checks and examine the first one. Nothing. Then the next. Nope. Your stomach drops as you get to the last check and read the word 'zero' scrawled onto the tip line. Dejected and exhausted, you look at the clock. Five more hours of your shift to go. The next group walks in.

Whether this scenario feels familiar or not, it's important for everyone to understand just how shitty it is to be a server sometimes, especially during a plague. Not only does treating service industry workers like literal garbage make their lives a living hell, it poisons the soul of the evil-doer. Treat workers with respect and don't forget to tip—it's not that damn hard. Alternatively, if being a jerk is the only thing you know how to do and you truly believe that treating people like dirt is a valid personality trait, you can simply stay at home. The restaurant industry doesn't need mean customers in order to thrive. We've collected some frustrating experiences that servers shared on r/TalesFromYourServer. Hopefully these stories will either humble people who frequently dine out or give solace to those who hate their jobs. 

It's no surprise that many professions cut corners and do some sketchy shit to make an extra buck or save themselves a hassle. Many businesses claim their wares are homemade when they're actually mass-produced, or in food, pre-prepared and frozen. Some places commit highway robbery by upcharging at a serious margin. These are some pretty widely accepted (albeit unfortunate) truths. But u/CircleBox2, in the name of demystification, asked redditors to share the darkest secrets from their industries. And some of them are shadier than we expected.

The interminable disappointment and disaster we humans have brought upon ourselves throughout history is certainly nothing new, but 2020 has been like a giant mirror reflecting our failure as a species back at us. As the global pandemic just keeps truckin' on into the new year, people are dealing with the darkness in different ways. We at Memebase look to those who use humor as a coping mechanism, because what else can we do but just laugh sometimes? One redditor had the same idea and asked Reddit what a hypothetical 2020-themed cocktail would look like if they ordered one in a bar. The answers are hilariously befitting and communicate how people feel about this cursed year with perfect simplicity. Take a look at some of the best answers from the thread.