A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step—but sometimes you get 500 miles into your trip only to realize you’re going in the wrong direction.

On Tuesday, redditor Imagine_Baggins (whose username is not only an exemplary play on words, but also a relevant ode to finding yourself mid-journey) posed this question to the Ask Reddit community: “What’s something that took you way too long to realize?”

Maybe you went five years without getting wise to the fact that “boobacles” is not a medical term. Or perhaps you thought this innocent emoticon was a universal reference to a lewd sex act.

Or, if you’re like redditor Andromeda321, you went a very long time without realizing “that Lennon of the Beatles and Lenin the Communist revolutionary were two different people.”

(Imagine all the people who made that same mistake.)

No matter how savvy and world-traveled you fancy yourself, we’re all bound to have a few embarrassing gaps in our knowledge that might take a few decades to be exposed.

But when these points of unenlightenment come to light, there’s no need to be embarrassed. Just follow the admirable example of the over 10,000 brave redditors who shared their delayed epiphanies to make you question whether ignorance is bliss after all.

Who ever said that your journey of a thousand miles had to be in a straight line, anyway?

Spellings You Never Noticed

Not-So-Secret Identities

Christmas Infidelity

A Real-Life Waterboy Moment

An Underappreciated Python Joke

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Rowling With the Pun che s

Truth Bombs (That Took a While to Go Off)

To read the rest of redditors’ delayed realizations, head over to the original discussion in the Ask Reddit community.