You eat cereal directly from the box while standing in front of the fridge at midnight. You rehearse entire conversations in the shower with people you’ll never actually confront. You smell your clothes to determine if they’re clean enough to wear again. Here’s the thing: everyone does weird stuff like this, but we’ve collectively agreed to pretend these behaviors are perfectly normal parts of being human.

The gap between how we actually behave and how we present ourselves to the world is hilarious. We’ve all developed these bizarre little rituals and habits that make complete sense in our heads but would sound absolutely unhinged if we said them out loud. Yet somehow, when someone finally admits to one of these quirks, the response is always the same: “Oh my god, I thought I was the only one who did that!”

The Phantom Phone Vibration Phenomenon

You feel your phone buzz in your pocket, reach for it immediately, and find absolutely nothing. No notifications. No calls. No texts. Just your brain playing tricks on you again. This happens multiple times per day, yet you never learn. Each phantom vibration still triggers that Pavlovian response of reaching for your device.

The weird part isn’t that it happens. It’s that we’ve normalized checking our phones dozens of times daily based on imaginary alerts. We’ve trained ourselves to be so hypervigilant about digital communication that our nervous systems now create false alarms. But do we talk about this in polite conversation? Absolutely not. We just keep checking our silent phones and pretending we’re not slowly losing our minds.

Even better is when you’re holding your phone and still think you feel it vibrating in your pocket. Your brain is so committed to this delusion that it overrides the physical reality of the phone being in your hand. Yet we all nod along like this is completely reasonable behavior for a functioning adult.

The Great Grocery Store Performance

Walking through the grocery store turns everyone into amateur actors. You grab an item from the shelf, immediately read the label with intense concentration like you’re a food scientist conducting research, then either return it or place it in your cart based on criteria you made up on the spot. You have no idea what half those ingredients are, but you’re going to scrutinize that label like your life depends on it.

The best part? When someone else enters the aisle, you suddenly become very interested in the products at eye level, even if you need something from the bottom shelf. God forbid someone sees you squatting down to grab the discount pasta. You’ll stand there pretending to compare organic quinoa prices until they leave, then quickly grab your bottom-shelf item like you’re shoplifting from yourself.

And don’t even start with the self-checkout machines. We’ve all had that moment where the machine yells “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA” and you look around frantically like you’re being accused of a federal crime. You didn’t steal anything. You just put your groceries down slightly wrong. But now you’re performing an elaborate pantomime of innocence for the attendant who definitely doesn’t care and has seen this exact scenario 47 times today already.

The Cart Return Calculation

Every single person has a mental formula they use to determine if they’re close enough to the cart return to actually use it. Is the return 15 feet away? You’ll walk over. Twenty-five feet? Now we’re in the gray area. Forty feet? That cart is getting gently pushed into a planter, and you’ll tell yourself you’re basically a good person because at least you didn’t leave it in a parking spot.

We’ve all agreed this moral calculation is normal, despite it being completely insane that the difference between being a courteous human and a lazy monster is approximately 20 feet of walking distance.

The Social Media Detective Work We Never Admit To

You meet someone new and within 30 seconds of getting home, you’ve found their Instagram, scrolled back three years, looked at their tagged photos, checked their following list for mutual connections, and formed a complete psychological profile. Then you see them the next day and pretend you know nothing about them beyond what they explicitly told you.

This investigative deep-dive is now considered basic due diligence before any social interaction, whether it’s a potential date, new coworker, or just someone who seemed interesting at a party. We’ve normalized what would have been considered stalking 20 years ago, and we do it while simultaneously being paranoid about our own digital footprints.

The truly bizarre part is the mental gymnastics involved in maintaining this charade. You have to carefully monitor your own reactions to avoid revealing that you already know they went to Barcelona last summer, own a dog named Chester, and have strong opinions about sourdough starter. You’ll ask questions you already know the answers to, feigning surprise at information you learned from their 2019 photo dump. We’re all just walking around having conversations where both people are pretending not to know things they definitely know.

The Accidental Like Panic

Speaking of social media investigation, we’ve all been there: you’re 87 weeks deep in someone’s Instagram, and your thumb slips. You’ve just liked a photo from their cousin’s wedding in 2018. There’s no coming back from this. Your options are to either immediately unlike it and pray they didn’t get the notification, or commit to the bit and like several recent photos to create plausible deniability.

The fact that this causes genuine panic and requires an actual strategy is completely deranged, yet we all treat it like a legitimate crisis that demands immediate action planning.

Talking to Pets Like They’re Bilingual Toddlers

You use a completely different voice for your pet than you use for any human being on the planet. It’s somehow simultaneously baby talk and serious conversation. You’ll ask your dog profound questions about their day, their feelings about the neighbor’s cat, and their opinion on what you should make for dinner. Then you’ll answer for them in yet another voice you’ve assigned as their personality.

What’s truly wild is that we reserve our most authentic emotional conversations for creatures who literally cannot understand language. You’ll tell your cat things you’d never admit to your therapist, and you’ll do it in a voice that would make you unemployable if anyone from work heard it. But the moment another human enters the room, you snap back to normal speech patterns like you weren’t just having a full debate with a goldfish about existential dread.

The best part is how we create elaborate backstories and personalities for pets. Your hamster isn’t just a hamster. He’s Gerald, he’s going through a difficult time right now, he prefers classical music, and he’s judging your life choices. You’ve built an entire fictional character around an animal that spends 90% of its time sleeping and has the memory span of about 30 seconds.

The Temperature Wars We Wage With Ourselves

You’re too hot, so you stick one leg out from under the covers. Now you’re too cold, but also somehow still too hot. You spend the next 20 minutes adjusting your blanket position, removing and replacing socks, and flipping your pillow to the cold side like you’re trying to solve a complex puzzle. This happens every single night, yet you never think to just adjust the thermostat or get a different blanket.

The same logic applies to the office thermostat wars, where you’ll bring a sweater in summer and pray for survival in winter, but you’d never actually suggest changing the temperature. You’ll just suffer in silence, building elaborate clothing layer systems and developing strong opinions about whoever controls the AC.

Cars take this to another level entirely. You’ll blast the heat, get too hot, turn it off completely, get too cold, turn it back on at a different setting, crack the window, close the window, adjust the fan speed, and repeat this cycle for the entire drive. You could just find a comfortable middle ground, but that’s apparently not how human beings are wired to operate.

The Shower Temperature Dance

Every shower starts with you adjusting the temperature knob in microscopic increments like you’re defusing a bomb. Too hot, turn it slightly. Now it’s ice water. Turn it back. Now it’s scalding. This pattern continues until you either find the magical perfect temperature or just give up and accept that you’ll be slightly uncomfortable for the next ten minutes.

The fact that we’ve been using the same shower for years but still can’t remember the exact right position for the knob is something we simply choose not to examine too closely.

The Elaborate Excuses For Not Answering The Phone

Someone calls you. Your phone is in your hand. You’re doing nothing important. You watch it ring, feel a wave of anxiety, and send it to voicemail. Then you spend the next five minutes crafting a text message explaining why you couldn’t answer, as if you were performing emergency surgery rather than scrolling through recipes you’ll never make.

We’ve somehow regressed to a point where actually answering a phone call feels like an aggressive social violation. The phone’s primary function has become to notify us of all the ways we can communicate without using it as a phone. We’ll spend an hour texting back and forth to coordinate something that would take 30 seconds to discuss on a call, and we’ll feel good about this choice.

The voicemail situation is even more absurd. If someone leaves you a voicemail, you won’t listen to it. You’ll see the notification and immediately text them asking what they wanted. They’ll text back “check your voicemail,” and you’ll both be locked in a standoff where neither party will surrender. Eventually, you’ll either call them back without listening to the message or just let the voicemail notification sit there forever, haunting your phone’s home screen like a digital ghost.

Pretending We Remember People We Definitely Don’t Remember

Someone approaches you with enthusiastic recognition. You have absolutely no idea who this person is. Not even a glimmer. Your brain is completely blank. But do you admit this? Absolutely not. You’re now in a full conversation, dropping vague phrases like “How have you been?” and “It’s been too long!” while desperately searching their face for literally any identifying information.

You’re running through every possible context where you might have met them. Former coworker? College classmate? Friend of a friend from that party? Random person from the gym who thinks you’re someone else? The entire interaction is just you buying time and hoping they’ll say something specific enough that you can finally place them.

The truly skilled practitioners of this art can maintain the charade through an entire 10-minute conversation without ever admitting they have no idea who they’re talking to. You’ll laugh at inside jokes you don’t remember, ask about mutual friends whose names you don’t know, and promise to “do this again soon” before walking away still completely clueless about that person’s identity. Then you’ll immediately text your most socially connected friend with a vague description hoping they can solve the mystery.

The Snooze Button Philosophy

You set your alarm for 6:30 AM, which means you actually plan to wake up at 7:15 AM after hitting snooze exactly six times. You know you’re going to do this. Your past self knew you were going to do this when setting the alarm. Yet you both participate in this elaborate fiction that maybe this time will be different, and you’ll actually get up on the first alarm.

The nine-minute snooze interval is particularly offensive to human intelligence. Why nine minutes? Nobody knows, but we’ve all accepted it as gospel. We’ve built our entire morning routines around these arbitrary nine-minute increments, calculating exactly how many times we can hit snooze and still make it to work on time.

Some people set multiple alarms at staggered times, creating a 45-minute wake-up window filled with different alarm sounds and increasing urgency. This is somehow considered more normal than just setting one alarm for when you actually need to get up. We’ve convinced ourselves that being gradually annoyed into consciousness is superior to just waking up once like a reasonable human being.

The truth nobody wants to admit? We’re all just lying to ourselves about being morning people while simultaneously being very committed to that lie. We buy sunrise alarm clocks, download meditation apps, and read articles about optimal sleep cycles, then ignore all of it to hit snooze repeatedly while having stress dreams about being late. And tomorrow morning, we’ll do it all over again, somehow still believing this is a sustainable system.