I’m comfortable enough, and don’t really care about more money. The red pill is the easy choice. What value do you put on a year of life? I’d be getting back 44 years, for five million bucks? I’d turn down 100 times as much money in exchange for 44 years. And not having tinnitus, a sore back, poor near vision, etc.
Money’s no good to you if you are dead, or so sick/tired that you really can’t do much. I’m guessing someone like Warren Buffet would trade a billion dollars for another five years of healthy living.
I would do it even if the caveat is that you can go back to 16, but won’t be allowed to make any more money than you made the first time around. Or even if the rule was that you can never do better than middle class. Then the option would be, live out the remainder of your life in luxury, or get to be young again with a guarantee that you’ll never be rich. I’d still pick the red pill.
I’d need more details about the red pill. What happens to the stuff my 16 year old self knew but I have since forgotten? How am I going to explain why I all of a sudden don’t know the combo for my locker, all of my friend’s phone numbers which I had memorized but not written down anywhere, my class schedule, how to play piano, and so on? And what about my ability to learn things? One of the huge attractions of being 16 again is that a 16 year old brain can learn a lot more easily than a 46 year old brain. Would I get that learning capacity that my 16 year old brain had, or be stuck with my ossified 46 year old learning capabilities?
Red pill for me, no question. I do think that 16-year-olds in my generation had it better than 16-year-olds today will have it, so going back in time is to my mind better, but I would still take being 16-year-old today.
This is highly dependent on current age, of course. When I was 18 I would have taken the $5M–it would have more impact at that age, and I had not learned all that much in those two years. What is the cross-over age, I wonder? I am thinking about 25 or so–that is when a do-over would have started to matter more.
I would also add that waking up in High School English class, knowing everything I know now and nothing I knew then–locker number, locker combo, class schedule, where the next class is, how to prove the Pythagorean theorem–resembles an awful lot of the nightmares I have had over the years.
Exactly! I think the ideal timing would be to start on the first day of summer between sophomore and junior year. But Christmas Day of 1993 wouldn’t be that bad either. I’d at least remember having watched the Thanksgiving game between the Cowboys and Dolphins a month prior, and Leon Lett’s infamous gaffe that handed the Dolphins the game. Hopefully that would be enough knowledge from the time period to satisfy people who were curious about my sudden memory lapses .
ETA: It would be embarrassing when my grandfather and cousins asked me what I got for Christmas and I would have to tell them that I don’t remember, even though from their point of view I would have just opened my gifts around 12 hours prior .
I’m living plenty high on the less-than-fatcat hog already. From that base $5M moves my needle, but doesn’t set me up for private jets, high end leased women, nor 50 foot yachts.
Waking up in high school history class, knowing what I know now and hadn’t been taught then about American history, would be rather touchy.
Though, come to think of it, I just remembered who my history teacher was when I was 16. Maybe it would have been OK – though I would have had a lot of trouble finding sources to back some of what I’d say, if I did open my mouth and say it.
A lot of what was so awful could be mitigated be knowledge I’d bring back with me. I know how to kill H.Pylori and cure my ulcers. I know that I could have bought the antibiotics at an aquarium store.
And I understand now that my parents were narcissists, and would have the perspective to just be an uninterested audience to their tantrums. I also know how to block a blow and how to scare a bully, so theirs and my bother’s physical abuse would be easier to address.
But there would still be the hellish pain of living unloved while still being legally dependent. And that would not be a fun situation to walk back into.
Nonetheless, the opportunity to go back and give Celtling a non-abusive father - or even just have her through a sperm bank - is too compelling to refuse. There is nothing I wouldn’t suffer to be able to spare her what he’s put her through. And she is so much like me, I have no doubt that changing her father wouldn’t change who she is. She’s a little soul who was meant to be my daughter.
Yeah, you’d need a good college library or access to interlibrary loan (which you can technically get from any public library but would need to know what you are looking for in order to make requests). Even then, a lot of documentation on the American slave trade was not formalized in reference texts until the late ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies, and even Zinn doesn’t go much into the use and abuse of Chinese laborers and their use to expand the railroads westward because solid scholarly work in that area is still hard to come by.
Since it’s a hypothetical anyway, I’m going to assume going back to 16 isn’t some Twilight Zone Monkey Paw where I can’t remember my girlfriend’s phone number and get institutionalized by my parents for buying the wrong brand cat food. I think there’s compelling interest for me to rerun my life with the context gained about myself so far, even if I don’t invest in $6 Bitcoin and Apple stock.
Why wait for investments to come in? Most peole can probably remember the winners of the major Horse races etc over their life. Put your money into those and earn even faster returns.
All of these hypotheticals seem to end up the same for me. No, I wouldn’t change anything about my life. Some horrible shit happened, but so did a lot of good shit, and in this particular case, one of the greatest satisfactions of my life has been actively seeking the wisdom I have now. If I hadn’t had to work so hard for it, it would be empty of meaning. I don’t even want the extra years. I just want what I already have, and any attempt to change the past would jeopardize all of it.
Through your tech investing scheme you’d inadvertently accelerate the development of biotechnology, metamaterials, and machine intelligence resulting in the post-apocalyptic killer-robot future as imagined by James Cameron. It doesn’t matter if you did this deliberately or not; just your prescience will inevitably and unconsciously drive you to recreate this image through your subtle influence of choices and actions (or inactions). You will end up being so wracked with guilt about not stopping the various horrible incidents of the early 21st Century (all of your warnings and letters to the FBI, the Senate, and the President will be ignored), that you will be driven into insanity and seeking an end to humanity.
<rod serling> @Jophiel …another hopeless gambler with a system that he believes to be guaranteed not to lose. A man who thought he could beat the odds with Fate, only to realize that in the casino of life, the house holds all the cards. Another destitute player in the dark alley behind…the Twilight Zone.</rod serling>
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