Spent my whole adult life going to school in prosperous, and well-educated Utah. Joined the Army after graduation and was assigned platoon leader. First time I briefed my men on a training mission, they just stared at me blankly. A sergeant pulled me aside and told me to use simpler words.
I hitherto believed that all adults could understand collegiate words.
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I had never tried brown bread from a can before.
Dutch-American culture not being the norm outside of West Michigan
It’s really just small things every once and awhile that I notice. “Going dutch” is probably the biggest one that throws me for a loop everytime I experience or see it not being done.
I spent most of my life in a Dallas suburb before I moved to Denver at age 21. I remember working with a woman in her 50s and I was very surprised to hear her saying supportive things about Obama and other democrats. I had never heard a woman over 40 say something supportive about democrats prior to that.
I grew up in the Philly area but went to university in the Midwest. It was a big adjustment realizing that hostility is not the universal default setting when encountering new people.
First duty station in the army was Ft. Stewart, GA. Oh, my, the south really is different.
My first trip outside of the southeast was six weeks in the USSR. Changed my life and my perspective on almost everything.
I went to college with people who had never gone to school with Black people before and wore clothes with the designer labels prominently displayed. I thought that Black people being a minority was referring to their representation in government or something, not that there are actually less Black people than White people in most of America, and I thought the designer thing was just for celebrities who advertised because they got the clothes free. I was very book smart but really oblivious as a young adult.
This makes me sound like an ass, but it didn’t occur to me until college that most American families have shared bathrooms.
My college friends were talking about “waiting for the bathroom in the morning” like it was a universal experience, and it took me a minute to catch on.
My house had 6 bathrooms. All of my friends growing up had similar houses and their own bathrooms.
I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut though.
When I lived in Illinois in my teenager and early 20s phase I was in the suburbs, but when I went off to university in somewhat rural Dekalb,Illinois I was blown away how much nothing there is outside of the college town
I don’t know if it was my “bubble” or the bubble of people I met in university, who were leery about walking through a residential urban neighborhood to a supermarket, because it had mostly multi-family houses and apartment buildings. I think they came from the nicer suburbs with mostly single-family housing. They also had zero idea of how public transportation worked.
I moved away to college and my junior year lived in an off-campus apartment. I remember overhearing another student in the front office getting upset with the office manager because he wanted to bring both his Lambo and R8 to school but the apartment community only allowed one vehicle per resident. Meanwhile I was driving around a 15 year old truck with over 150,000 miles on it.
It was then that I realized I was living in the wrong kind of bubble.
I had been previously unaware just how aggressive homeless panhandlers could be having not grown up in a city.
So many things.
I grew up in a very remote, rural area in northern MN and moved to the Twin Cities to go to the U of MN.
The traffic was god awful. I’m kind of shocked I didn’t die in the first month while I was learning it all. Everyone just moves so much faster.
Meals are more complex— when I was growing up, we would make things like, a side of rice and stewed tomatoes with butter salt and pepper, and some roast chicken, or like, mashed potatoes and cream gravy with just some fried venison steaks. My roommates looked at it like it was peasant food.
The hobbies are different— rural places don’t have the easy option to go catch a sports game or go to a show. Those were trips planned well in advance.
Hunting and fishing openers were practically holidays back home— versus in the cities they were barely noted for most.
I grew up in Eastern Kentucky. Technically there is no city in the area I’m from. It’s whats called an unincorporated area. Meaning there are just a few hundred people leaving there, but no city so to speak.
To get to the nearest Hospital, restaurant, Wal-Mart, etc etc was over an hour drive. So when I moved to Columbus Ohio to go to college, basically everything was a culture shock. I moved up about six months before starting college and the first apartment complex I lived in had more people in it than my entire “hometown”.
The biggest thing though, was that I didn’t have to have everything stock piled at home. Running out to town to get something was no longer a 2-3 hour minimum round trip. If I ran out of deodorant it wasn’t a huge deal. I could pop into Wal-Greens and get more in like 5 minutes. Back home, you would buy 5-6 at a time because we only went to town about once, maybe twice per month.
I was actually talking about this last night with my wife. We went to a fair in town last night and were talking about how pretty [one of the churches in town is](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59224c47ebbd1a907460663f/1544922310674-Q7AE8VGLKZ9Y4XT9M1EQ/STEEPLE_1533326663918_1533326753177.png?format=1500w) when I confessed I thought all Christians were Catholics up until college.
I went to a private Catholic schools from kindergarten through 12th grade and have absolutely no idea if I ever spent much time with anyone who wasn’t Catholic. It’s not even like my family is especially religious or anything. Everyone was just Catholic.
I experienced this in middle school.
In a class of 40 students only about half lived in houses, and only 3 of our parents owned their homes. I was the only one with two sets of grandparents who were homeowners.
I pretty quickly learned which side of privilege I was on and do my best to not be an ass about it.
When I got my car broken into after like 3 weeks. That was my “Welcome to Tucson!” moment
Went from a town of about 300 people to one with 300k for college. I worked in the DA’s office there during my freshman year. Compiling the cases on gang violence and murders was very eye opening.
I visited South America right after high school (1970s) and witnessed desperate poverty for the first time. Very young homeless orphans begging in the streets. Their mothers had abandoned them, so they were being raised by other homeless orphans. That shocked me deeply and it still troubles me.
I grew up in an affluent town with one of the best school systems in the state. I knew I lived in a bubble, but what that meant didn’t hit me until I went to college. The work ethic and just general knowledge of some of the other kids there was astonishing. My bf grew up in the same town and went to a different college and his experience was the same. Not that there weren’t hardworking, knowledgeable, intelligent people there, there absolutely are. But what I had thought baseline/average is not actually baseline/average.
I still struggle with this now. I grade papers for a college and the quality of the majority of the work is abysmal. Out of a few hundred kids there were three that I think did a really good job on their work.10-15 did a good/decent job. Most of it is utter garbage, and it’s extremely concerning.
My boyfriend once said to me “you didn’t grow up with a lot of people with accents, did you?” I apparently have a hard time understanding people with accents, enough that he notices.
Basically no one who works a service job in our area was born in this country; which is very much not true of where I grew up. He’s from this area and has no problem, but I have to ask them to repeat themselves most of the time.
When I was young in the Atlanta suburbs, the beginning of the street had a bunch of not as well taken care of houses that I’d later found out had a lot of drug addicts.
When we moved to Birmingham, my sister went to a party for the kids in school band. The entire party was in the garage of the guy’s house. She was flabbergasted that the garage had a white tile floor (She was just thinking about how much it would take to keep it clean with all the oil the cars would possibly spill on it).
When I was in college I had the chance to go on a trip to South Africa to do field work. It was the first time in my life that I’d gone farther afield than Canada and it was pretty eye opening. We were kind of in the back country too, so it wasn’t like we were in a city or any of the touristy parts.
Miles of corrugated steel shanties and listening to the radio talk about 1/3 unemployment and 1/2 the population being hiv positive (I might have those numbers mixed up but it was 1/3 and 1/2 the population) was very sobering. The people were kind tho. I remember the guy overseeing the area where we were working brought us coffee on a chilly morning. That was nice.
But I do think back to it when people call the US a “third world country with a Gucci belt”. Pretty sure those people have also never left their bubbles.
Freshman in college, moved from Maine to Massachusetts. Asked why so many friends were going home for Easter. Was told very reproachfully that it is the most important holiday to a Christian. I was homeschooled by atheists and never really met practicing Christian’s before.
Grew up in South Florida. I was in Pensacola for ‘A’ school so I expected the normal small town stuff there.
I get to San Diego and the first weekend I’m there some of my friends from C school want to go out. I’m like “cool, I’m down let’s fucking do it. I’m going to take a nap before we go out.” 8 pm rolls around and my friends are banging on my barracks door asking me why wasn’t I ready. I told them I thought we were going to go out later, but no biggie maybe they want to start the night early. I shower, put some clothes on, take a couple shots in my barracks room, ya know the normal stuff.
We go out to Gaslamp and go to a few bars, talk to some ladies, step in a homeless guy’s pee, ya know, normal Gaslamp stuff. 0145 rolls around and the bar we are at is doing last call. In my head I’m like “Last call? It’s only 2. Whatever let’s go to the after hours spot”. We start walking down Gaslamp and ALL the bars/clubs are closing. I’m like “what the fuck gives???” I want to keep drinking to the point I’m asking people “yo where’s the after hours spot?!?!” and they are all looking at me like I’m a crackhead. I finally ask this group of girls and they said “go to Tijuana that’s where we are going!” I didn’t have a passport.
In my South Floridian bubble, I thought every major city in the world stayed open past 2 am. I thought everything stayed open until at least 6! I thought every city had an after hours spot like Space where we could party until 12-3 in the afternoon.
San Diego has an ok bar scene and a growing underground rave scene; it’s not Miami. Hell Miami isn’t even the Miami I grew up in.
Riding public transit and noticing non-white people.
Grew up in a very very white area. Rural. Maybe 5% of my high school class were non-white students. Went for some college visits in a much more metropolitan area, yet still known for being relatively “white” cities.
Riding the train from the airport into city center, and having a sudden realization that *I’m white.* Not scared or bothered, just an overwhelming feeling of racial recognition.
My hometown was a white AF bubble.
When I started college at University of Tennessee-Knoxville and I was either one of a few POC or the only POC in my class. It was more of the latter the further along got in my undergrad plus graduate school at the University of Alabama.
I am black Army brat and I grew up in Clarksville, TN. Military towns tend to be very demographically diverse. I believe my high school was 40% White, 40% Black or Mixed, 10% with at least one Asian parent, and 10% Hispanic of any race. I think the University of Tennessee was like 80-85% White at the time.
I grew up mostly in the Midwest. I went to a nationally very highly ranked university in the Midwest. It wasn’t until I got there that I realized the full extent of East Coast preppie-dom. With their little clothes and their little shoes. Like a little clone army (dare I say “of silliness”).
The reason they were there in the first place is because they were also all an army of Ivy-league rejects. Anyway, we had no one like that in the neighborhoods and cities I grew up in.
Was on a ski trip in Colorado, about 15 years old. They had these shuttle vans to take us from the lodgings to the slopes. On the ride im sitting next to a random guy, he asks me if I ski. I laughed and said hell yeah or something. And he pulls out a pocket mirror and offered me a line of cocaine. I waited till my early 20s to try coke.
I grew up in a super conservative and religious rural town outside of Houston.
I moved out the summer i turned 18 and went to college in Austin.
As a gay kid who was deeply in the closet in HS, it was such a liberating and amazing yet very overwhelming experience. My world was rocked in a great way. I went from thinking I’d never have a girlfriend to being deep in my slut era because there were so many out queer girls around.
I knew I was in a bubble in my little rural town and knew Austin was very different but I didn’t expect my world and life and worldview to change so much. I was exposed to so many ideas and ways of life.
My buddy from Montana hadn’t seen a black person before going to bootcamp.
I learned when I moved from my moderately ethnically mixed small town (like so small you probably wouldn’t identify it as a “town”) to the big city near by that Rednecks and Hillbillies are **no where near** as racist as people are in the city. And it was coming from all colors of the melanin spectrum there.
My wife did her student teaching in West Terre Haute Indiana in 1977. So many of her students had dirt floors or no indoor running water or only had outhouses and no indoor toilets.
I had the inverse experience of OP.
Moved from a rural area in the deep south to the Boston area when I was 20.
Realized I wasn’t a super genius and that everyone I grew up around was just a fucking idiot.
I got a scholarship to attend a boarding school for high school. I went from being in a low income school system where I only ever had Black and Latin classmates to being in a school that cost $60k a year to attend with not only white classmates but international ones as well. My second week there a group of us that where walking to a local mini mart. Parked out front was cop car and inside I saw two officers inside. Up until this point every time I was in a group this large it was inevitable that we’d be watched and a good chance the cops may start asking unnecessary questions. So I mentally prepared myself to get through this situation. I was shocked at the lack of hesitation and tension with how my white and international friends moved through the store. No one asked us anything, said anything, or tried to follow us around. It was at that point that I realized the world had completely shifted for me just by being in a different environment.
I don’t know which one is us you would say had lived in a bubble, but…
Growing up, I lived in an area and went to a school with a lot of people who were from single parent households, got free school lunches, that sort of thing. I was considered one of the ‘rich kids’ because my parents both had salaried jobs, and lived in a house that had a built in garage and driveway. I quickly learned from a young age that under most circumstances, one shouldn’t flaunt their or their families wealth.
When I went to college, my first roommate either bragged or complained about everything. How she ‘went to an elite boarding school for high school’, was annoyed that freshman couldn’t bring their cars to campus there weren’t enough organic vegan food options on campus, everything. She was surprised when most kids on our floor said we had all worked jobs the summer before we got there. It felt like a I was living with some character from a comedy movie about rich kids.
This was one of the many reasons why within two months our RA forced us to split apart into different rooms, and to this day I’m still in disbelief on some of the stuff she just didn’t realize about the world.
My husband grew up in a very affluent area and he was the ‘poor family’ in the area. They lived in a 7000 sq ft house and his parents made 300k a year. He was very offended when I visited his parents house the first time and called it a mansion. We moved to an extremely HCOL area after graduation and he still felt like he grew up poor. Then we moved to a new state for me to go to school. The city we moved to constantly makes the list of top places to live in the US and the median household income is about 50k. It took about 6 months of living in the new city for him to finally start to understand how ridiculously privileged his upbringing was.
When I saw my university’s library and realized all the knowledge I could obtain.
I was a surprise retirement baby. My parents had tried to have kids for a decade and never conceived. They did the whole FIRE thing, too. As such, I constantly heard what a miracle I was.
I was shocked that people didn’t want to talk to me about me all the time.
I was shocked that I had to share a room, a bathroom etc.
I was amazed that the one time I was late to breakfast they wouldn’t give me anything.
Somebody actually yelled at me freshman year.
Eventually I got a real job after grad school. I was even more shocked to learn that my parents fibbed about our being poor. (They probably shot for lean FIRE and lucked into a fat FIRE. They were not expecting a kid or to spend more on my tuition than they did on our customized house.) I grew up around a number of 1 percenters. I thought it was normal to recieve cars for birthdays and graduations. I thought student loans were strange things that people got if their parents were irresponsible or didn’t care about them.
I got feedback at work that my colleagues/subordinates thought I was a snob who used big words to make them feel bad. I am not an empath even though I’m female and that is some kind of expectation. I couldn’t tell someone was tired or sad just by looking at them just that they were screwing up. Most of my coworkers were old enough to be my parent. Eventually there were more people my age but they had wildly different life experiences. I couldn’t understand what happened to them that they were still in college past 22. It wasn’t my business so I never asked.
Lots of eye openers.
I’m kind of sad that I’m still having such eye openers. I don’t “look like” what most Americans would consider a sheltered woman looking like. When I was single I’d get “Princess and the Pea” tested. They’d take me to rough areas for dates and then notice I was terrified or I couldn’t swallow the food. There is a notion that people from my ethnic group are all quite poor and used to rough, crime infested environments.
I still have my parents’ save for a rainy day mentality and OMG don’t be flashy people will steal! Can’t blame former suitors so I kind of look poorer than I am. LOL I had to recently replace my ancient car. Now I drive a Silicon Valley D0uche Mobile.
ETA — It was the most cost efficient car. I was talking to some pals about what a great buy it is for cost of ownership classed it with other vehicles that aren’t luxury vehicles either. One pal told me that my tone was that of someone who scrimps and saves but doesn’t realize that all the cars I mentioned were considered expensive.
I kind of had the opposite effect. I learned just how many were living in a bubble. I got to live around the country and in another country because I was a military child.
My “bubble” was thinking people desired to be outside of the bubble. I ended up choosing a college where many of the students there never left the state. Most of them couldn’t even deal with being an hour away from home. It was maddening hearing so many people call their parents to cry when they ran into just a minor inconvenience. Of course not everyone was like this, but it was happening way too often than it should have I feel like.
My dad gave me a choice: go into the military or go to school for accounting. I went hitchhiking. I went to Grateful Dead shows, hitched up and down California a couple of times, and learned how kind and how awful people can be.
I went with a friend and one of our first rides was a Mexican guy who barely spoke any English, but he was extremely kind and bought us food and beer. Another person was a redneck who dropped us off near a prison so we had to walk a few miles before anyone would pick us up.
One time in a little remote restaurant, we had only a couple of dollars and were trying to figure out what we could get that would be the most filling. A couple of big breakfast plates were put in front of us. Some old guy overheard us and took pity on us.
Another time we were hitching by the side of the road and a redneck swerved to try to hit us. We jumped out of the way and flipped him off, calling him an asshole. He swung around and I heard him say, “Git the gun, honey!” to his wife in his truck. We managed to talk him down, but it was pretty surreal.
Turns out the immigrants are the good people who will try to help with what little they have and the rednecks are the assholes who will go out of their way to create misery for others.
I grew up in a small New England town. For the Most part we knew every one! I didn’t see much opportunity at the time & wanted to see the world, plus I hate the cold, I ended up in the south here & I guess when it hit me was I was dating a girl who had a sister with 3 little kids who was renting a bedroom from some girls her age with kids also, there were a lot of kids crawling around when we visited her one Christmas evening . When I seen this it was thee most broken Christmas I have ever saw. No fathers around the place was not clean & a dump, a Charlie Brown Xmas tree , a very elderly grandmother that was not aware of anything. Each kid had one little toy at best. I felt so badly for all of them it was so sad. I thought back to Christmas at home with the big table and family this was the opposite. I left An went to the nearest store that was open & bought a bunch of stuff for everyone. I’m not sure why but I think about this now & again & it made me thankful for what I have an had. This was some years ago and them kids all of them are all grown up by now I often wonder how things turned out for all of them and I hope they are all happy
I worked on an experiment in bumblefuck with a bunch of other physicists, one was black and like myself he was from New York City.
He was asked by a local black person (who had obviously never met him before) if he was the son of so-and-so, and that made me realize how few black people lived in the area. Absolutely wild to me.
I grew up in a middle class suburb, where most families were considered upper middle class. I thought my family was extremely comfortable, if not doing well for them selves.
As soon as I went to college, I was surrounded by girls who had gotten plastic surgery as high school graduation gifts, guys who would blow hundreds of dollars every week for bottle service at our local club, and students who drove around new BMWs and Mercedes, with the occasional McLaren and R8 hanging around. Mind you, I went to a *public* university (a great school, but not a place you’d expect to see those things).
Then when I moved to Los Angeles for work, I was in for a rude awakening. I met a group of people in their mid-20s during a trivia night, and I thought they’d also just be struggling to figure things out / starting out their careers. **No.** They had all traveled the world extensively for their careers, could name their favorite hotels/restaurants in every U.S. state, had *so much* work experience with big name companies/executives, etc. It definitely made me feel inadequate and realize that I grew up in a bubble.
I grew up in a very rural evangelical Christian community. I was decently traveled as a kid and knew other places were different, but my real shocker was getting a job at a manufacturing plant. I had to interact daily with people who believed very differently than me. In my belief system these good people would all go to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus as their personal savior.
Long story short, that belief system lasted all of a year and a half after I started that job.
I grew up in the northern Virginia area, which is a suburb of DC. I went to school in Richmond, VA. Some things I noticed:
1. People in NoVA pronounce “both” like “bolth”. Now that I know, I can’t not hear it.
2. People in NoVA start every conversation with “what do you do for a living?” I thought this was normal but now I know it’s so you can see if you are better than them and judge them accordingly.
3. I learned a lot about the inner city and I became more progressive because of it. This had nothing to do with indoctrination from the university, like people assume. I went to engineering school so there wasn’t much opinion being taught. And when there was opinion, it was about engineering, not social commentary.