The grass is always greener.
Only children want siblings. Siblings want to be only children. There is no winning.
But both sides come with lessons and lifestyles unknown to the other. And siblings seem to have a leg up on little things, here and there.
u/Pbackrider asked:
Children in multi-sibling households, what lessons did you learn that the only child might never get?
Here were some of those answers.
Win One To Lose One
When you're getting food in the middle of a show, carry the TV remote with you.
But you have to accept that you will lose the favored chair. No way around that one.
EDIT: Lots of comments about saving the chair. "quack quack seat back" and "fives". Ha, not in my fam, fam.
"quack quack seat back, I get the chair back"
Everyone: "OK"
Get back, someone in the chair.
"Mom, Dad, I called quack, quack"
"SHUT UP AND SOLVE IT YOURSELVES!!"
Unspoken Contracts
As the oldest child: because you get there first for everything, you may be punished more or less severely than your siblings for the same offense. This will piss off every other sibling.
Also there is an unspoken code of "if the parents weren't home when *object* broke, nobody saw it break." They'll try to prisoner's dilemma all of the kids. The more expensive and/or difficult to replace the object, the less any of the kids saw anything. Even if it could be proved that everyone was in the room when the item broke, nobody saw it happen. Why? Because this time you're covering for your sibling. Next time they will cover for you. It is a bond that will only be broken once, because if it does break the next time the kids are alone the snitch is gonna get it real good
Building The Bonds
Teamwork
I have a bunch of brothers. My dad early on would punish you if caught in the wrong, but if you were tattling you got double. So instead of telling on each other we worked together to stay out of trouble.
It made my mom mad when she demanded who did something. She would threaten to punish all of us if one of us didn't confess. We all maintained our silence and accepted mass punishment. Afterwards, me and my brothers would talk over how we got caught, what mistakes were made and how to avoid it in the future.
To this day we are all very close, and though we are all scattered around the world, we still talk 3-4 times a week.
Scheming Galore
How to act completely ignorant of what happened. "Where was your sister?" Mom asks. I say, "I don't know, I was asleep in my room the whole night." In reality, I was awake playing videogames with a walkie talkie keeping tabs on her the whole time and letting her know when I hear anything downstairs and I told her to come home when I heard our mom go to the bathroom, so she'd be in the yard when mom went looking.
The art of blackmail.
Comradery and having tons of time to hatch plans and build stuff.
Learning to deal with and enjoy people you don't choose to be around because you don't pick your siblings or their personalities.
Machiavelli Is Watching This Guy From Somewhere
Speaking as an older brother, you bully the younger ones to keep them in line. But you also protect them from other bullies because they're a valuable resource - they'll have your back if you have theirs. They can back you up in a fight, back your story up to the parents, take a share of the blame, and are pretty reliable if you need some minor thing taken care of. It's basically gang leadership 101 - managing your street level guys loyalty without letting them get ambitious enough to try to take you out.
Edit: and of course, you also protect them because you love them. Figured that was understood, forgot to add it. It's not all cold utilitarian logic. Just some.
I Just Wanted The Marbles, Man
It doesn't matter what YOU want to do!
So many only-child friends seemed to dictate the entire household. If kid wanted to go to the beach, they went to the beach. I didn't even get to pick whether I wanted McDonalds or Burger King for dinner- my mom was picking which one she wanted so she didn't have to listen to us bicker.
Also, if your younger brother eats random things, you aren't allowed to have marbles in the house. Doesn't matter that you're not some moron who eats inedible objects, your brother is a moron, so you suffer.
Bargaining Skills
Negotiation.
Nothing like rallying your siblings to your side when you have a common enemy (normally mom) and then negotiating the distribution of the result of your efforts.
Am the only girl and the baby. Set me up well for my career negotiating with angry dudes all the time.
Tommy...Michael...Gus...Whatever Your Name Is!
My parents couldn't keep the names straight between us, so I got called my sister's name, the dog's name, the neighbor's kids name...
They'd also combine our names so when they called us they were somewhat right all the time.
God bless, they're good parents though.
Edit: I love reading everyone's stories and am so glad we can share this experience together!!
How To Push But Not Push Away
How to argue without going for the jugular. I'm oldest of four and we could argue, scrap and wrestle without causing much damage no matter how angry we were.
Even now, we'll disagree but get over it immediately without being hurtful. You need that skill to survive in a family and indeed, the world. My ex was an only child without cousins and was horrified by fighting of any kind, but when he did get into it he was the nastiest, cruelest most vicious person.
He'd say some truly awful things without seeming to realise he'd have to live with these people or in that community after the dust settled. He never learned to play fight or about boundaries and was unable to understand our sons rough and tumble. He'd Wade into any kind of light-hearted, laughing wrestling and stamp it out. It took me forever to teach him that all children need to learn how to argue and even physically scrap in order to learn boundaries and respect for each other and themselves.
Whose Problem Is It Anyway?
When "You can hit me back!" is not effective, you have gone too far and actually owe an apology. Or you've created a manipulative psychopath, in which case you owe an apology to the world.
You actually won't know which it is for years.
Redditor r3tr0gam3r83 wanted to hear about which realizations in life have left people SHOOK, so they asked:
"What is something that blew your mind once you realized it?"
Avocados are not vegetables.
They're fruits, berries to be exact.
Like what?!?!
Colleagues
GIF by Bud LightGiphy"Sometimes it is more important to like your colleagues than the actual job."
"I had shi**y jobs with the most amazing colleagues and had shi**y colleagues and the most amazing job. I'd pick the first every time."
chr989
Star Trekking
"That you could legitimately travel at warp speed through the center of galaxies and never run any real risk of hitting a star. That’s how spread out space really is."
justanotherguyhere16
"Also, galaxies, stars, and even the Universe is constantly moving. I think time travel has been invented, but they can’t figure out the 'space' part of it.
"Yes, they can travel back in time, but relatively speaking, they can’t figure out how to navigate to the part of the planet they want to reach. So when they travel back in time, it’s relative to where they currently are, and end up not moving through space, thus ending up in the middle of an empty vacuum."
theknights-whosay-Ni
Jaws is Old
"That sharks predated the rings of Saturn."
BeardedDominant
"Sharks also developed the immune system that ended up in both dinosaurs/birds and mammals."
csiz
"We don’t know that. We can’t say for certain that the rings are only 100 million years old. It’s still debated."
The_Kek_5000
"I'm pretty sure that sharks are older than trees."
Cayderent
From the Trees
"One day I sat on a tram, passing a river. There was a duck in a tree. I realized I'd never seen ducks in trees. No one else seemed to notice, but I was puzzled. Now whenever I come across something that seems intuitive but I have never considered I call it a duck in a tree."
Ol_Pasta
"This realization happened to me this past year. We apparently have a family of wood ducks in one of the big trees in our yard. Our neighbor said she has seen a duck walking around on a branch. I made it 37 years without knowing some ducks can roost in trees. My wife caught a video of the mama leading like eight ducks into the field next to our house. We aren't even near water."
jwbourne
Artistic Timeline
Confused Eminem GIFGiphy"Pablo Picasso and Eminem were both alive at the same time."
leebon427
"I’d bet a lot of people think Picasso is a Renaissance artist."
editormatt
I admit it. I'm one of those people. Pablo and Marshall, in one lifetime.
New facts are fun.
The New World
Design Loop GIF by xponentialdesignGiphy"They were colonizing the Wild West at the same time as they were building skyscrapers in Manhattan. I always think of them taking place eighty to a hundred years apart. It's wild."
Emilayday
Oh the Power
"Nuclear power plants are just steam power plants that use nuclear reactions to heat the water. There's no fancy magic extracting energy directly from nuclear material. They just boil water and spin a turbine."
RenaKunisaki
"Most electrical generation is spinning a turbine. Photovoltaic solar power is pretty much the only exception, and it's not the only form of solar power. There's solar thermal power, which uses mirrors or lenses to concentrate the heat of the sun to make steam and turn a turbine."
Brawndo91
The Empire
"The Roman Empire fully fell less than 50 years before the discovery of the new world."
South-by-north
"The Romans also had copper wire, magnets, and battery acid. They could have invented electricity hundreds of years before it was actually discovered. But they didn't. The wire was used for jewelry, the magnets as lodestones, and the battery acid was used to clean the rust off of swords."
Kahzgul
"RIP Byzantine Empire. 1453 never forget."
crossbowman44
The Witness
"Owl‘s silent flight. I mean I always knew that but a while ago was the first time I actually witnessed it. Owl came flying towards me and landed only a few feet away and you couldn‘t hear anything. Crazy."
Zealousideal-You-324
"I saw a barn owl swoop down and catch a mouse while hiking at night, and the whole thing happened in complete silence. It gave me a deep sense of unease because it was literally like someone hit the mute button on life."
VulcanVisions
Bad Kermit
Kermit The Frog Meme GIF by IdentityGiphy"Poison dart frogs aren't poisonous in captivity."
"I own 5 of them and anytime I tell someone I own some I always get 'Do you ever lick them' or 'Can you go kill someone with them.' But yeah they get their poison from what they eat, and all I give them is fruit flies."
JMfury
Poison frogs?
That sounds like something Rose would have a story about on 'The Golden Girls.'
Redditor rentinghappiness wanted to hear about the things everyone really didn't know anything about until it happened to them, so they asked:
"What is something you used to think people were over-exaggerating about until you experienced it yourself?"
We never really know anything about anything until we try it for ourselves.
Mouth Issues
Dentist GIFGiphy"Dentist chiming in… tooth pain. I knew academically how painful they could be until it happened to me."
juneburger
"You know the pain is serious when you start looking forward to the inevitable root canal."
HailMari248
Wonders of Nature
"Giant sequoia trees. When I finally saw them in person, they looked fake. I could not comprehend a tree of that size."
schaefer001
"And we may have lost 15-20% of the remaining trees during some big fires in 2020 and 2021. A 2011 estimate puts it that there were only 80,000 remainings. They truly are wondrous organisms that I feel like everyone should have the chance to experience if they can."
"I'm a big believer in doing everything we can to protect and preserve these silent giants. It's really sad that so many were cut down by loggers when the wood is such poor quality for human purposes, to begin with. Such an utter and sad waste."
this_is_poorly_done
Just Me
"Loneliness."
Fried__SoapI
"I'm with you. Put all my cards into a girl who went suddenly cold and dark on me. Now I'm alone at rock bottom figuring out my next moves. You know, the smartest people in the world and also the happiest people in the world can be the loneliest?"
"I was only recently informed it's okay to talk to myself and hype myself. Enjoy my own company. I'm absolutely going to learn to do that. I'm thinking of painting, walking, and weekend trips out on a bus. Would be nice if you could have joined me even if we sat in silence."
Roofdragon
The Years Gone By...
"The physical pain of getting older. Damn."
marklikeadawg
"The emotional pain too. I get so nostalgic and teary over the past and how much has changed. It's a weird grieving process over losing your youth and the way things were."
heethersmeether
"On my 35th birthday, my wife woke me up with a cupcake and a candle, sang me 'Happy Birthday' and then congratulated me on being '15 from 50'... that really hit me hard. The other day I turned 45 and she said '5 from 50' and that hit me so hard, I just wanted to stay in bed all day. I still feel like an irresponsible teen but I'm pushing 50. Insane."
Opa_Kalaka
It's Hazy
Confused Always Sunny GIF by It's Always Sunny in PhiladelphiaGiphy"Brain fog. I had an alcohol withdrawal seizure in March. My short-term memory and sense of time are absolutely sh*t right now. On the plus side, I haven't had a drink in over 90 days and I don't want one."
Sideshow_Bob_Ross
Oh the wonders of the brain.
What a mess.
Scorched
Menopause Hot Flashes GIF by Kino LorberGiphy"Hot Flashes. I didn’t think they were this bad. I’m a 31-year-old man who took Wellbutrin for the past month and hot flashes are a side effect."
"I thought you just thought you were hot. No motherf**ker you are. You’re super hot legitimately, and you have to do something about it or you’ll go insane. It’s not in your head. It’s your brain raising your temps until you can’t focus on anything else."
_PswayZ_
Everlasting
"Chronic illness, there is absolutely no way you can truly understand the impact unless you experience it."
Disastrous-Phase-979
"Just that idea of always being sick and you will NEVER not be sick again."
"AND you're expected to participate in society just the same as everyone else. It's deeply f**ked up."
Farisr9k
"I like the part where I've been in pain for 25 years so I can kind of still function even when it's really bad."
"And then I try to get an ambulance guy or an admin assistant in a hospital to believe that I'm having an emergency and they're like 'You seem fine, take some Tylenol and go home' until I finally get a blood test, and then the doctor goes 'Holy crap, you're about to die, why didn't you come to the ER sooner.'"
"Like, listen up MF, I had to take a go**amn Uber to get here and then argue with reception for an hour."
BlahBlahILoveToast
Stoned
"How much a kidney stone hurts."
SpiritusSanctu
"Most people expect it to hurt the most when passing a stone through the urethra. Nothing prepared me for the pain as it passed through my kidney/ureter."
"One second I would be fine, carrying on conversations, prancing around nimbly-nimbly. The next second I would be keeled over, crying in agony, losing my lunch due to the sudden onset of crippling pain. 0/10 ... Would not recommend it."
King_of_Lunch223
Close Your Eyes
"Insomnia."
Successful_Fall7801
"Oh, what I would give to not have insomnia! I go through periods of sleeping more or less normal, and then for seemingly no reason, I’ll have weeks on end where a good night of sleep is IMPOSSIBLE. I’ll get 2-4 hours of sleep despite pills, tea, baths, white noise, meditation - everything."
"I’ll spend my days so deeply, utterly exhausted that I can barely think, and my whole body feels heavy, lifeless. It’s hard to feel any kind of emotion, let alone happiness or contentedness. Just existing as a human-shaped puddle until the time when I can go to bed and hope to god that tonight will be different for some unknown reason."
"Insomnia is a real bi*ch. It will tank your mental health and send you spiraling really fast."
thesmallshadows
Beep
Meme Reaction GIF by TravisGiphy"Tinnitus. It’s torture."
DissidentBliss
"I don't mind it much 'cause I've had it since I was born. That means I don't know what proper silence is."
77x5ghost
"Me too, they thought I had hearing issues when I was young because I couldn’t really hear some of the beeps well because they matched the pitch of the ringing."
ehter13
Don't judge another until you lace up their shoes and walk a mile in them!
Do you have anything else to share? Let us know in the comments.
