Suppose a malevolent jinn came to you out of nowhere and made you choose between a painful horrifying death and either of the following:
100 year life package - You’ll get to live for 100 years. No more. That is if you are 30 years old right now, you still have 70 more years ahead. You may only die before reaching 100 if you choose to kill yourself or have yourself killed.
some pros and cons…
PROs:
You’ll get to live to be 100. The average lifespan nowadays is about 70 years.
You will not die of accident.
CONs:
Your normal lifespan could have exceeded a hundred years.
Even if humanity develop something that will prolong life, you will not be able to benefit from it. Once you turn 100 you’re done.
A bit disadvantageous if you are like 99 years old right now.
Four 25 years cycle - You are going to live until you’re 25 years old. After that you are going to be born again but you’ll get to retain your memory from the previous 25 years. Your life will be four 25 year cycles. If you are past 25 years right now, say 40, you will be given a 10 day period before you die. The next cycles will only last 25 years not 40. You’ll still retain the memory you had during your previous life. You will be born exactly the same as your original birth. Same starting point for all cycles. Same ending also.
some pros and cons…
PROs:
Your total life might exceed 100 years.
You’ll get to retain your memory! Imagine that!
CON’s:
You will die four times.
You’ll only get to live in a 25 year time frame. If you’re born in 1970, you will only live until 1995.
You will not be able to see the developments in the future.
You’re not clear on how your four cycle plan works. You seem to be saying you’ll get four separate 25 year lifespans, with reincarnated memories carried over. But you also say that your total life might exceed 100 years. How?
It seems to me that either way you’re getting a total of one hundred years. The pros of the four cycle plan are you avoid old age. But you also avoid middle age and a good portion of being young. And you have to go through childhood and adolescence four times instead of once and then just when your life is finally hitting its peak years, you die and start over. Plus, I figure having past life memories is going to screw up your head.
Say you are 40 now. You choose the 25 year cycle. Your life now is the first cycle. You will die after 10 days. Second cycle starts. Will last 25 years. Third cycle. 25 years. fourth cycle. Again 25. 115 years total.
The 25 year package doesn’t have much to recommend it. You get to experience being an adult trapped in a child’s body over and over. You might retain your memories, but nobody else does, so they will treat you as a child. A delusional, mentally ill child.
Yeah, the 25 year cycle sounds pretty horrible- huge chunks of your life are spent not even knowing how to read, and you probably never get to experience the joy of an established career and family life.
To the contrary – I can read from birth (or as early as your eyes are developed enough). I can become the most incredible super-prodigy the world has ever known – four times. I can play doctor with the little girls, and know what I’m doing, and get laid thousands of times each life. As a super-prodigy, companies will be lining up to offer me good jobs just for the PR value.
I only see one downside. As a guy in my mid-50s now, I’m no longer particularly attracted to women under 30ish, as I perceive the younger ones as kids. So if at say, age 10, I’m repulsed by the idea of screwing a 16 year old girl and see it as some kind of pedophelia, then it’s a bad deal.
Are you a prodigy now? The deal didn’t include anything about you being any smarter than you are now. So your mom, and you, get to brag about the early age at which you read and how riffmatic was so easy for you in grammar school . Then you reach the same level of understanding where the material gets to be too much for you that you have now. And at 25 you die. Four times.
Nonsense. Once your mouth and palate is developed enough, your first words can be “Take me to the library”, before your parents have ever spoken the word “library” in front of you. You can impress your teachers by being able to perform the work of a college student while still in kindergarten – assuming you can perform at that level now. There’s no doubt whatsoever that you could be a college graduate by age … 12? … 10? Depends on how many hoops there are to jump through.
By that time companies are making you offers, like I said before – for the PR value. Hell, by that time you could make a fortune on baby food endorsement contracts alone. Some might hire you with the expectation that your learning curve will continue and that you’ll end up another Einstein. They’ll be wrong, but you’ll still be young, rich and famous.
The flipside of this is that you’re SO freaky that you get treated like a lab rat and get locked away as a study animal – which I don’t think is all that high a risk unless you’re actually caught diddling your classmates too early.
I suspect the 25 year cycle would be filled with frustration, knowing you’re spending more than half your life in a holding pattern on many things. Unable to NOT notice when your parents are fucking up; never being able to fully trust them if you think, even once, that they’re doing things in a way you don’t want. So the whole family dynamic is skewed. This may not be a bad thing in comparison to some folk’s current/past childhoods, but still: to be a child without EVER being able to BE A CHILD again has got to equal frustration deluxe for most folks.
Then again, barring accidents, you have the chance to live 4 lifetimes without seeing your parents die first.
But you can’t seriously consider having kids, not if you want to raise them. So that’s off the table. Even for me, someone who hasn’t had any and isn’t going to, I lived my life knowing that at any time it was an option and my choice. Now that’s gone, and it does take something away. Then again, I know that I don’t NEED kids, at all, it’s not an emotionally necessary thing, so I could live with that.
Well, anything beats an awful death, so I’m still on the fence.
What companies are those? Can you point me out a couple examples of real life companies who recruited 10 or 12 year old geniuses? IIRC, the more common pattern for prodigies is that they go early to college, are generally pretty lonely there as they are children among adults, and they seldom go on to “greatness” in later life.
Don’t forget that with each iteration of the cycle you are going to be that much older as you are trapped in that child’s body. Assuming you are of the typical Doper’s age, you’ll already be mentally over 100 years old as you begin the final cycle. Well, you’ll be mentally over 100 chronologically despite having lived several (weird) partial lives instead of one complete one.
Since, as I understand it, you are being reincarnated each iteration, not simply going back and starting over as the same person, you’ll have several sets of biological parents. You are carrying over the memories of who you are, though, so my guess is that you will always think of your parents that you have now as your “real” mom and dad. The ones to whom you are born in later incarnations will not be the same people. They will have entirely different personalities and personal backgrounds from your real mom and dad. I expect you will tend to regard them primarily as obstacles to be overcome. Shit, is there a guarantee that you’ll even be born back into the same culture? Imagine, if you will, that your next incarnation from the one where you are now finds you born to a Conservative Christian couple or (if that is you now) you are born to parents of no standing in the worst third world shithole you can imagine.
You are going to be perceived, and treated, as a delusional, mentally ill child at best. At worst, you’ll be in a culture where you are perceived as possessed or a witch child and they will do something horrible to you.
I do not understand this point at all. If my 6 month old started speaking fluently and was capable of college level math my first thought would not be either mentally ill or delusional.
Part of the ‘fun’ of life, a big part, is experiencing new things, and knowing that things can change. I’m only 46, and an optomistic son of a bitch, but even I have felt what I call ‘emotional fatigue’ regarding just…living. And I could totally see just being too ‘tired’ to go on any more, especially if I knew what was going to happen next, such as having to go through puberty again <would I even be the same gender? omg, the horror of being a teenaged boy over and over again, aargh!!> yeah.
I suspect that if this were a regular option, there’d be a sudden and sharp increase in the percentage of suicides under 10, lol.
I’ll go with living to 100. I know that the last 20-30 years of that won’t be any kind of picnic physically, and I am likely to end up mentally not all there, either. But I’m accused of that now, anyway, so I’ve got practice!
I’d pick the 4 cycle plan. Once I’m reborn I’d spend the first couple of year becoming the spokesperson for as many companies as would have me (I’m thinking eTrade, Gerber, and maybe Capital One or whoever has those adds with the baby that doesn’t want more cash). I’d skip college, and try to milk my fame for as long as possible. Stash as much money as I can. Once the novelty wears off, vanish from the public view and enjoy myself, only come out for more cash. When I am near the end of the cycle stash the money somehow where the next me will be able to access it. You may not be able to get another go at the spokesperson deal the second time around but if you play your first cycle well you should have enough money stashed to live comfortably the rest of your cycles.
Your six year old would still be a six year old, albeit one good at math and language. You, after reincarnation, would be an adult of more than middle age in a six year old’s body complete with all the memories of your previous lives. You are not going to act like a precocious child. You are going to act like a deeply weird kid who apparently believes himself to have been other people.
Try it yourself. See how long you can believably play the part of an innocent, but smart child, who loves hir mommy and daddy, and lacks real world experience beyond what a child has. Remember that in reality, you’ll actually mentally be older than your “parents,” you’ll have been through this several times, and you’ll have a countdown clock running that means in just a handful of years you are either going to start it all over again or die for real.
