Suppose you could start over from scratch, with the advantage of all your accumulated wisdom, but without knowledge of how specific decisions would turn out. Meaning, you have the general knowledge that you’ve learned about life, how the world works, how people are etc., but don’t know how this or that relationship/job/child-rearing decision/etc. would turn out. How different and more successful would your life be?
I tend to think most people would have an edge over the way things actually played out. But probably not by as much as people think. Hindsight is always 20-20 as to specific instances, but you do see people making the same mistakes again and again. Conversely, you also see people who made one type of mistake determined to never make that type of mistake again and overcompensating in the opposite direction.
[In looking back to childhood and adolescence specifically, I think you need to distinguish between wisdom/knowledge/experience on the one hand and emotional maturity and societal expectations on the other. A lot of people’s increased sense of responsibility as they age is not about more knowledge and the like but about different emotional drivers, as well as the different role society places them in. I think that’s a separate issue.]
Frankly, it would be nigh on impossible to tell how different it might be/turn out, etc. Although I would have the accumulated “wisdom”, that still wouldn’t give me knowledge of how situations would turn out or how people would behave so it’d still be a crap shoot. You can bet on what you THINK might happen or how a person would react/behave, etc., in a certain situations (relationships, etc.) based on past experience, however, if history has taught me anything, it’s that people rarely do what you think they would, and situations really don’t follow a game plan.
Besides, there’s no percentage in looking back - I’m certainly not going to start the hell over!
I would have joined the Coast Guard instead of the Navy (if I’m allowed knowledge such as “I’m more suited towards the CG and probably would have enjoyed it more”), most likely. I would have been a kinder person, especially towards women, in my 20s. I would have started writing much, much earlier than my late 20s.
My biggest regret in life is not getting treated for depression as soon as it began in high school, or at least in college, the first opportunity I had to go without needing to rely on my parents to allow it.
I had grown up as a pretty outgoing, creative, adventurous kid, and then I began to suffer from depression in high school, peaking (dipping?) severely in college. (At one point in my freshman year, I didn’t speak at all for three weeks.) The depression left me unable to really participate in the college experience, especially socially, and by the time I graduated I had become chronically withdrawn and socially anxious. I’m still recovering from that to this day, 15 years later.
While I’ve still accomplished some pretty cool things despite that anxiety, there are so many opportunities in life I refused (and refuse still) to take because I was too afraid – afraid that I wouldn’t be able to handle the challenge out of a lack of self-confidence, or afraid of the humiliation that would inevitably come if I failed.
Even smaller things would be different, like, hey, maybe I wouldn’t have let so many people walk all over me because of my fear of confrontation, or maybe I would have pursued music seriously instead of letting that one embarrassing concert performance scare me away from performing ever again.
I have a pretty good life now, but I think of the life I could have had if I had remained that outgoing, adventurous person I was as a child, and I could just kick myself. To say the least.
If I started over I would be aware of my attention deficit disorder and as I do now just apply myself a little harder. I was close to 50 years old before I discovered I could learn things if I spent more than 10 seconds trying.
I’m sure my life would have been much different, however, it may not have been much better. I was driven to success by adversity, had I known better how to avoid that adversity as a young man I might have frittered my life away on short term gratification instead of working my way up in the world.
My father became seriously ill when I was 8. He died when I was 13. I went from being the only child center of my parents’ attention, to someone who occupied the same house. I was not ignored or mistreated, but I was largely left to fend for myself emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically.
Much of this I didn’t figure out until I was an adult and could understand adult feelings and emotions. My mother did try to reach out to me again when I was about 15, but by then the damage had been done. I was convinced she’d stopped liking me and had the whole teenage rebellion syndrome in full gear anyway. I didn’t get close to my mother again until shortly before she died.
I wish I had possessed the knowledge of human behavior that I have now. I’d have better understood the circumstances and not felt that I was a bad or unworthy human being, a burden I carried around for years afterward. I wouldn’t have had the difficulty with later relationships that I experienced and I wouldn’t have been such a skittish parent to my first child.
I would have stayed in school longer and gotten a couple additional degrees. I would have bought Microsoft and Apple in the early '90s. I wouldn’t have been such a dick to my past girlfriends.
I wouldn’t want to relive my childhood, but if I could start at age 18 with what I know now, I’d be considerably better off. For starters, my choice of college major would be different.
My childhood sucked and there was nothing I could have done that would certainly have improved it. Even one regretted decision (telling the divorce court that I wanted to live equally with both parents, mostly because I was afraid of my father if I said the truth) might have been disastrous in reality (because my mother died two years later). Given my general life experiences, though, I’d probably get a chance to see how that alternate choice would have worked out. Badly, I expect.
Other than that, I would at least reject a lot of the bullshit I got from teachers about needing to change the world and aim for the top and all of that nonsense. I had a lot of encouragement in life toward various objectives, and I know they meant well, but they were wrong. I don’t want to be first place. I don’t want a Nobel prize. I don’t want history books written about me. There’s no need to conquer the world when all you want to rule is your backyard. What I’ve learned is that you should do well, and you should not limit yourself, but that contentment and happiness are what actually matters. It was that realization that let me “settle” for being a “mere” accountant… had I got started on that ten years earlier, things would be better now.
I’d be a much better athlete. I learned the value of cardio too late in my college career for it too help me out. If I’d been working on my weight an cardio in high school I probably would have gotten better D1 offers and might have had a shot of going pro.
Beyond that I don’t think much would have changed I might have done better with women but that would have had more to do with getting into shape earlier.
I don’t think having the benefit of accumulated knowledge would necessarily mean things would turn out better in the long run.
You might come to a decision point and say to yourself “I’m going to do X instead of Y this time”…and that choice might start a chain of events that result in getting hit by a bus.
Your question is kinda fuzzy at best, so let me toss in some requests for clarity and options.
What point in our past are you defining as ‘starting over from scratch’? It has to be a point where our brains are developed enough to contain and hold onto all our accumulated wisdom, at least.
And are we going back that point in the past, or going back to that age, but in the present? (I’m assuming the former, but just want to make sure.)
If I’m ripped out of my current life, which I’m quite happy with, I’m gonna be quite pissed about never seeing my wife and son again. (If I go back to age 9 or earlier, my wife likely won’t be born. And my son’s bio-parents probably won’t be born, let alone my son.) Can we stipulate, say, that I go back to whatever time, from my deathbed at age ninetysomething?
Do we keep all our accumulated knowledge - for instance, will I still know integral calculus?
We don’t know how events will transpire this time, and I’m assuming any random event, any human decision, has the same freedom to take different paths as they did the first time. But do we keep our memories of how things turned out the first time?
What’s the difference between wisdom (on the one hand) and emotional maturity (on the other)? Maybe there are some things that are clearly one or the other, but if you took a Venn diagram of the two, AFAICT it would be mostly overlap. Certainly no bright line between them.
My life is far from perfect, but it is pretty good. I would not change a thing about my kids (ok, maybe I could tweak a thing or two), and I’m a firm believer in the butterfly effect. I’m afraid if I would have decided I should study harder and not just coast through school for example, maybe I wouldn’t have had time to take up Scuba diving and become a lifeguard, and through that meet my wife and have those exact kids.
Based on this I think I’ll choose not to hit that reset button.
What I can do is tell my kids what I think I should have done differently and as a result hopefully they will benefit.
The question doesn’t seem to be ‘would you choose to, if you could?’ but ‘if you did, would it work out better, and if so, by how much?’
If the question is ‘would you hit the reset button if you could?’ I’d have to be on my deathbed. I want to be around for as much of my son’s life as possible.
Assuming the ‘deathbed’ part, sure, I’d do it. I think I could do a lot better on a second go than on my first. (How much better, and what the details are, depends on the answers to the questions I asked the OP. If I come back as a 6 year old in 1960, but with all my mathematical knowledge and understanding as intact as they’ll be 35 years from now, I’ll have to persuade my parents to put me directly in grad school.) I might be a bit impatient with childhood, but if I’m bringing the totality of who and what I am back into childhood and adolescence, so many situations that bedeviled me in those years would be easy. And I’d be coming at life with the equanimity and the long view of a mature person, yet hopefully the curiosity of someone who never stopped growing intellectually.
If I know what events transpired during my first go-around, I’d have a sense of which events were robust - nearly certain to happen any which way - and which ones were the usual rolls of the dice. And use that knowledge for profit. Even if the Yom Kippur War doesn’t happen, at some point during the early to mid 1970s, the oil-producing nations collude to drive up oil prices. So if you’ve bought some producing oil wells in 1971, you’re sitting pretty. Similarly with the seemingly sudden escalation of real estate values in Los Angeles in the early to mid 1970s. But will Bill Gates or Steve Jobs start companies that make computers or operating systems? No way to tell.
Yeah - wouldn’t change anything that would risk my wife, kids, and grandkids, but sure, I could do a bunch of things better. Shortlist chronologically: I would have paid more attention and appreciated it when my dad had me helping him work around the house as a kid. I wouldn’t stop playing piano the first chance my parents gave me the option after 8th grade, and making music would have been a much bigger part of my life. I wouldn’t have been such a fuck-up in HS and college simply skating by with minimal effort. I would have studied more science and math, as well as some foreign language. I wouldn’t have developed such unhealthy drinking habits in college.
But my life right now is pretty good. Really can’t complain too much. Maybe if I tried harder, things wouldn’t have turned out so well.
I would have finished college and gone on to be the half crazy civics teacher at some high school some where. I would have also taken better care of my teeth
I would have acted out more when I was little (say, younger than 7). That’s when some of my emotional problems (like self-hate) began. I didn’t cause enough trouble to really be a bother, and especially since I was good in school, my issues may as well have been invisible. However, my mom did do the best with what she had, so I’m not angry so much as sad (when I think about it).
I also would have taken my writing more seriously. All through the last part of elementary school through high school, I absolutely *loved *to write. Mostly fiction, but I wrote excellent essays as well. I would write **books **over summer break. It was so fun.
In junior year I realized that very few writers truly become successful, and decided that if I went to college (which was doubtful at the time) I’d study psychology. It sounded lucrative, I was good at it, and I wanted to help people. I continued to write however.
The first year of college I had a writing class that completely shook my confidence, and it was a couple of years before I felt like I could write fiction again. :o
Since then, I’ve written bits here and there, never finishing anything book-length. When I was about 30 I started having problems with depression, and that has cut my output even further.
My characters nag me, so I know I’m meant to write. But I can’t maintain my motivation over the long term, and I’m very self-critical.
I miss my writing. If I had that part of my life to do over, I’d want it back.
