How do I stop being a know it all?
Hello, I’m not very active on here so apologies if I use it wrong. I have an issue, I’m a know it all. For some background- Everyone in my family is extremely intelligent and all of all conversations are just intellectual in nature. We’re not rich or stuffy, some of my family never even have graduated high school, but everyone is extremely well researched and read. Some people are more literarily gifted and others are more stem driven, but everyone is always striving for the pursuit of knowledge. Yes, this is subsequent with lots of Autism, ADHD, OCD, etc. So when I started to venture out into my own social settings in middle and high school, I thought this was just how social settings operated. When someone would state a fact I might say ‘really? I read a research study by xyz stating the opposite’. What really peeves me is when people are so confidently wrong about things I know are false. I just can’t let them be wrong for some reason. It’s an absolutely infuriating idea to think that so many people walking around completely misinformed and spreading all this misinformation. The average person I meet doesn’t even know how to actually break down and understand a statistical study and in an era of ‘do your own research’ influencers take advantage of that to sneakily push their ideology. I know this trait is extremely annoying. I’ve tried sometimes to bite my tongue, but I find it so difficult to know when the right time to speak up is. For example I went on a camping trip with friends. I go camping all the time so if I wasn’t actively doing the camping task like firing the gas stove, pitching the tent, etc., I was explaining how to do it. Eventually the know it all jokes started coming and I laughed it off, but decided to shut up about pointers like “oh you have to rub in spray sunscreen”… then on our hike the next day everyone was continuously reapplying Vaseline to their lips and eyelids cause they could already feel them sunkissed from the day before, by the end of the day of course they were totally fucked and still trying to apply Vaseline to help it and wondering why it was getting worse and worse and I finally burst out “Vaseline amplifies the sun” and they were all so upset I didn’t tell them sooner. Even my partner will sometimes say “oh that’s right, you know everything”. I don’t claim to know things I don’t. I’m terrible at most maths, I would never make an uninformed and knowledge backed claim, but it’s the things I know for absolute certain that I can’t seem to not correct. That wasn’t impolite in the family I was raised in but it seems outside of that, it is. How the hell to I stop being such a know it all?
Posted Jun 6, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC