Curiosity tends to awaken an itch within you, and most of us have learned the hard way that scratching it does not always end well. The wrong drawer, the accidentally opened email, the conversation you were never meant to overhear from the other side of a door that was not quite closed. Some information arrives uninvited and then absolutely refuses to leave.

@chronicallyhumored asked the internet a simple question: what is a secret you accidentally discovered that you were not supposed to know? The thread that followed was nothing short of jaw-dropping, to say the least. These are the ones that stuck.

I was “accidentally” copied into an email reply, which was from a Partner in the firm requesting secret feedback, to try and discredit me after unearthing a massive mess up. The responder copied everyone in replying that he thought I was doing a great job. I have never been so grateful to a colleague for being supportive and not participating in that stuff.

When my parents got married. They like to tell everyone they’ve been married one year longer than I’ve been alive, they got married 5 weeks after I was born. I turn 42 this year and my parents were both claiming to be celebrating their 43rd wedding anniversary. I saw their marriage certificate when I was 16 and still laugh about the secret.

That my 2 colleagues were having an affair. I drove home and my street passes my male colleagues place. As I drove past, I saw the female colleague drive out, they kiss at the gate and she left. They had both left the office to go to separate commitments.

The urge to know what is not meant for you is older than the internet, and psychology has a few things to say about where it comes from. Social comparison is one of the more fundamental human instincts: we evaluate our own progress, success, and status by measuring it against the people around us.

Nosy people simply take this further than most, using private information as a personal scoreboard. There is also an insecurity component that researchers point to, where digging into someone else's problems or shortcomings creates a temporary sense of superiority that has nothing to do with actual self-improvement and everything to do with avoiding it. Knowing your neighbor's business is much easier than examining your own.

When traveling with a couple of now ex-friends, I heard them saying really horrible things about me, my weight, my personality. I never let them know I heard what they said. Spent the rest of our trip smiling and pretending to enjoy myself with them. As soon as we got back home, I blocked them, deleted their numbers and never spoke to them again. No regrets and it has been 10 years.