Hypothetical: You wake up tomorrow and it's 1/1/2000

In My Humble Opinion
41

Same.
There are a number of decisions that I made that while, not bad were also not necessarily the best decisions either. For example, in March 2000 I had two job offers - at the time, they both seemed potentially exciting and it was almost a coin flip. In hindsight, one was better than the other and that wasn’t the one I took.

Shares of Apple. Shares of Amazon. Gotten into the housing market sooner (even though at the time, that seemed foolish), take some chances where I played it safe and play it safe where I took some chances that didn’t have the best outcome.

42

That’s actually the first thing I thought of, too: How am I going to get into my locker?

43

Omfg! Y2k alert! Duck and cover! Y2k alert!

44

The year 2000 was the worst year of my entire life. I can’t even tell you how bad it would be for me to wake up and have to live through that all over again. Remembering my locker combination would be the very least of my problems.

45

You’d be better off loaning money to Zuckerberg. You’re probably not going to become rich off 10 years of Apple, although it’d be a good investment. You could, however, become a billionaire, with Facebook.

46

Aww, you had to go and say something sad. :frowning: Sorry about your dad.

I wouldn’t do anything as life-changing as that. I’d choose a different major in college, and maybe I’d have a job that’s actually productive and doesn’t crush my soul on a daily basis. That’s pretty much it. There are a few people who I’d maybe try to avoid, but I really wouldn’t change the course too drastically. I’m pretty happy with my life, and doing things differently wouldn’t make life much better, I don’t think. Hanging out with this person instead of that, or going to this play instead of the other – whatever, there aren’t a lot of specific choices I could make that I think would alter my overall happiness, except maybe the career path. Kids, don’t major in English. Seriously.

47

Not a bad date for me, really. A lot of life drama was behind me - married, no kids before or after, husband had his first job after the career change, I had a decent job. I would actually change very little except to avoid the short-term move to Joplin that we thought had to be done but which caused a lot of debt issues over the next few years. I’d do my best to aim at the same jobs, same houses, etc. Be more careful of keeping my weight where it needed to be (once again, not moving to Joplin will help tremendously there). Try to direct husband’s career a bit more through some uncertain times.

48

I would insist that my mother turn on the light when going to the bathroom during the night. Maybe this time she won’t miss the toilet and wind up on the floor . . . and dying 3 days later.

49

I would be back in the 8th grade, and probably none too pleased about it. As others have mentioned, I have no clue what my locker combination was so that would be a problem.

The most pressing thing I would do would be spending more time with and be nicer to my mother, who would die of cancer in close to three years. She was already being screened regularly from a previous bout with cancer, so I don’t think there would be anything I could do to change the outcome, but I’ll be damned if I would waste the chance to spend three more years with her.

Tipping off the FBI, CIA and whoever about 9/11 would be tempting, but as a 15 year old with no actual evidence and only a passing memory of the details of the plot, I doubt I would be able to make any difference. The same goes for various other terror attacks and natural disasters of the last decade.

When college rolls around again, I’d aim to get into Virginia Tech again and probably major in aerospace engineering again, though I’d give mechanical engineering a more serious look than I did last time. I might even be able to change events relating to the shootings in 2007, as the event was smaller scale and I remember the details better; if nothing else, I’d strongly encourage the people I knew who died that day to skip their morning classes. (I know the OP said history wasn’t guaranteed to play out the same way, but I’d have to try.)

On less depressing subjects, I’d definitely seek out the church I attended in college and the one I go to now much sooner. I took my time about looking into each of them the first time, but I developed such great circles of friends at both places that I’d rush to them at the first opportunity.

I wouldn’t grow my hair long again. I’ve already done it once; there’s no need to “try it out” a second time.

I wouldn’t try to game the stock market with my future knowledge. I haven’t paid enough attention to what is or isn’t big and don’t really care too much for the markets.

50

What an odd dilemna. On the plus side, I’d only have been married to my ex-wife for a few months at that point. It would be an excellent opportunity to work through some things and get out of that marriage before much time had gone by, and possibly even have a very good friendship remain intact. That last point seems unlikely, though, since the whole “I was in the future and you cheated on me ten years down the road and we had an ugly divorce” conversation would probably be awkward, at best. I also would never end up with the stupid tattoo I got related to my marriage. On the downside, my current wife-to-be would still be married to someone else, so I’d have to look elsewhere, which would suck.

It would also give me the chance to head off some health issues by making better choices in my life a lot earlier on. Like not drinking a two-liter bottle of soda every day. And maybe incorporating something green into my diet once in a blue moon. I’d start playing tennis much sooner and avoid fucking up my knee the way it is now.

I think I’d appreciate the relative cushiness of the job I had at the time. But I’d also be taking an approximately $25/hr paycut from where I am now, so I might just want to die. I’d strongly consider going back to school and getting a degree because I can’t imagine being as lucky in life with my career the second time around. Then again, having the knowledge I have now and being eleven years younger, it might be really easy for me to excel at a law-related job.

I think it would be frustrating and fascinating at the same time to watch baseball seasons (and other sports) again with the same players but different outcomes. Maybe the Dodgers wouldn’t be as useless for the first half of the decade this time around. Maybe Pujols breaks a leg in his rookie campaign and never becomes a great player. Maybe the Raiders don’t collapse into futility after the 2002 Super Bowl. Maybe Kobe and Shaq stay together forever.

I’d pay a visit to a law firm in Illinois and strongly suggest to an attorney named Barack that he ought to consider keeping a certified copy of his birth certificate handy at all times. I’d also be tempted to track down a very young Kim Kardashian and scare her into becoming a nun.

51

I wouldn’t recall my class schedule right off. I’d stay in school, but spend my time doing long-term shorts of Enron.

I might be able to stop 9/11, but I doubt it. I could find success predicting it on National TV, including specific details. If peopel listen, good. If not, I gave them a chance.

Following that, I would buy stocks and then drop them in 2006 and short-sell for the housing bubble.

52

I’d wake up in the same house I live in now, married to the same woman that I’m married to now, and working at the same place I’m working at now, albeit in a different part of the organization. IT support would help me with the password resets, so that’s all good.

The hard part would be: no Firebug. And no way to explain to anyone the ache inside my heart, knowing I’d never see him again, that I was in a reality where he would never be born.

That part would well and truly suck.

I’d take the initiative in making sure my wife and I worked through our fertility/adoption options sooner rather than later.

Other than that, no major changes in my personal and professional lives, just tweaks.

First thing I’d do with respect to investments would be to buy a bunch of Time Warner stock, with the object of selling as soon as the stock got its bump from the AOL merger news.

Next, I’d get hold of a list of the currently hot tech stocks, with some serious short selling in mind. Can you say “pets.com”? I knew you could! And there were plenty more of those around. Plus once the AOL-Time Warner merger was consummated, I’d short the fuck out of that too.

These events would all be pretty robust: the AOL-TW merger was announced early in 2000, so planning had to be pretty far along by 1/1/00. And the dot-com crash (including AOL’s crash) was based on fundamentals.

After the dot-com crash, I’d invest in Amazon and Apple, and invest in Google once their IPO came around.

Politically, I’d use some of my early stock profit money to make some political contributions to certain Palm Beach County and Duval County officials conditioned on their choosing a better ballot design. And if they still designed their ballots poorly, I’d make sure educational signs were posted outside of every last polling place in both counties on Election Day.

I’d also dump a good chunk of my stock profits into the Democratic GOTV effort in a number of smaller key states: Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. In AZ, NV and NH, Kerry-level turnout would have resulted in easy wins for the Dems in 2000; IA, MN, NM, OR, WI to make sure they don’t flip the wrong way in the redo of 2000. Hold the original 2000 Dem winners and make one pickup, and you don’t need Florida.

Nah, 1/1/2000 was the day we found out it was all a bunch of bullshit. So we don’t need to go through that again in this hypothetical. :slight_smile: