Tough choice, but at the age of 36 right now, I’m taking the blue pill and the money.
If I had been a 76-year old, though, I’d definitely take the red pill and go back to age sixteen.
That being said, though, I have to assume the OP means we don’t get actual knowledge of things like Bitcoin, otherwise it would be trivially easy to make $100 million with such foreknowledge.
Yes, but the butterfly effect is in full force. You won’t necessarily know the market outcome or Super Bowl winners. The world may unfold differently.
Correct.
I dunno. I figure you could pretty much count on tech/computer growth. Hell, you could encourage it to happen.
I suspect peoples’ age and current financial status would greatly affect their choice. At 63, $5 mill would not likely affect my standard of livng much if at all. And just about every time I get out of a chair I wonder about when my body used to act/react fluidly and painlessly.
Red pill, no question. The one sad point would be th eknowledge/likelihood that my kids would not exist.
My preference would be to be 16 back in 76, rather than today - but I’d take either.
OP says we keep all the knowledge we’ve accrued. While things may change as we live our lives differently (otherwise what’s the point of doing it again with new knowledge) I’m skeptical that I’ll change the world enough for Google to be a bad stock pick
Just curious, how much would it take to lure you into taking the blue pill?
I dunno. Maybe $100 mill. But I doubt even that. I don’t really WANT a lot more than I have. I guess it would be cool to buy multiple vacation homes and fly 1st class/chartered around the world. But I’m pretty comfortable in my (what I consider) upper middle class life.
I’m an atheist, so I’m pretty convinced this existence is all we get. At 63, with increasing arthritis, it is continually clear how many more years are in my rearview mirror than ahead of me. Whether or not I think I would do things “better” the second time around, there is no denying that I would have 47 MORE years (barring youthful death in the 2d life) than I have now. Hard to put a price on that.
In addition to just the increased span of years, what I could accomplish and experience with the health and vigor I had in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s far outweighs anything money could buy me today.
I don’t need the blue pill, but I don’t want the red one.
I’m 60 and I’m finally living the life I’ve always wanted. There is no way I could consciously recreate the circumstances for an equally happily life. With that kind of precognition I would either try (and surely fail) to change the world for the better, or more likely, just become a metaphysical plagiarist.
The blue pill comes with a lot less moral delemma and unintended consequences, so that would be my choice.
If I was given this choice at age 25, or 45, or 55, I’d have taken it with the assumption that I finally had my shit together at 25, 45, 55. But looking back from 63, I was as much shithead at those years in their own way as I was at 16. So I can assume I’m that as well at 63, and would still find a way to screw it all up in a young body. Give me the $5M. I want to install a petting zoo in the garden just outside my man cave.
My dad almost… almost bought ~10k of Microsoft when it first became available.
That would have made us multi-millionaires a couple of times over (I think).
Ooops.
Neither. No way. I’m old and happy and don’t need money and do NOT want to be 16 again, or any other age except the one I have (77). You can keep your pills.
Blue pill, please. (Though I’m not sure about cash…$5M in a more secure way would be quite welcome. 
)
True friendships and meaningful romantic relationships – not just sex – would be nearly impossible for a 52-year-old heart/mind in a 32-years-younger body. As lonely as I can sometimes feel now, it would be so much worse. The main things I’d want to fix/re-do would be my poor eating habits and nascent physical activity level, but I imagine the crushing emotional and psychological isolation would actually exacerbate those problems.
Either is fine with me.
Yeah, but then you’d somehow spur on real estate investor and third-rate business mogul Donald Trump to run for and somehow inexplicably win the Presidency.
I think maybe you should drop the pills, Mr. Taverner.
Stranger
Red pill, but let me swot up on Superbowl winners and a few long-shot horse races first.
Biff Tannen has nothing on me, baby!
Blue, definitely. I’d miss my wife and toddler if I had to go back in time. My life is good right now and with 5 mil I could retire and enjoy the rest of my life in peace and health.
Similarly, I was offered a chance to buy into Industrial Light & Magic back in 1975. I passed.
Some of these answers are quite poignant and touching.
I made a lot of mistakes - could I not repeat them? Would my constitution allow it? I don’t know.
And, if the former, can I do things differently?
– I think I’ll take physically 16, though. If I were physically 16, I’d have at least a reasonable chance of making more money the second time through the years. And, presumably, I’d have 55 years of life back, most of them healthy.
If I go back in time with current memories, making 5 mil would be easy. Buy up a lot of comics; sell them when they start to become worth something and buy Berkshire Hathaway at about $27. – hmmm. If butterfly effect, better spread that around a bit and buy a few other likely things. But I think it would be a pretty large butterfly to stop comic collecting from taking off at all; and they’d all be cheap enough – many used ones entirely free – in 1967 and probably for a few years after that so that it wouldn’t matter much which specific issues turned out to be valuable.
If I have to be 16 again without current knowledge – I’ll take the 5 mil. Being 16 was pretty awful, and I’d probably screw up in similar fashion everything I screwed up the first time.
Blue pill.
Age sixteen was one of the most traumatic years of my life (rivaled only by age seventeen.)
I still have nightmares about being back there again.
Never again.
Plus, risk never meeting and falling in love with my husband? As messed up as I was at age eighteen, if I hadn’t been messed up, we wouldn’t have gotten closer. One of the lynchpin events of our relationship was when he, a psych major, attended a student mental health advocacy group event where I was actively engaged. Afterwards, he sent me an email saying, “I am incredibly impressed with you,” the rest is history.
If I had to suffer to get where I am today, so be it.
Unless you are not much older than 16, it’s a no-brainer. Red.
Decades more life, with chances to fix all the stupid mistakes you made?
Though it does rather depend on whether this creates a new timeline, and how much that diverges from the original.
Assuming the timeline does not change (apart from different decisions you take), it wouldn’t be hard to accumulate 5 million just from general knowledge. And if you want to marry your partner you love, well, they would still be there for you… and you’d know where to find them!