If we have memories of all the events that happen in one lifetime, we might avoid certain people or events, but as soon as we go ‘off script’ we’re almost certain to act in a manner that’s true to our nature. In other words, you’d end up repeating the same mistakes, just with different people or situations.
Granted completely. A lot of our personalities are baked in by the time we start school.
But at the same time, our “nature” now as older adults is in some ways different from our “nature” as e.g. callow teens. I think most of us like to think we’ve gotten better at playing the game of life. Yes, still with some permanent blind spots and indelible bad habits. But also with fewer unforced errors.
The hope of scenarios like the OP’s is that some of that superior skill applied much earlier in life might lead to different and better outcomes. And we’ll also be gaining further skill and wisdom that second time around. e.g. By the end of doing my 30s twice, I’ll probably be that much better prepared to do my 40s even better, better than last time.
That’s the optimistic take at least. Tempered by the chance to have much worse luck the second time around, have your supposed “wisdom” backfire when you act with excess confidence, etc. Not to mention the difficulty of being happy or fitting in as a teen or 20-something when you really have 50 or 70 years of practice being something else. One could end up an outcast or misanthrope pretty easily I suppose. Ouch!
In senior year of high school, I would have studied my ass off for the spanish test, which if I’d aced, would have allowed me to get into college a year earlier. That year would have made an incredible difference.
I would have written down some of the family history while my grandparents were still alive.
I would make myself realize that if a girl asks you out “for coffee”, she doesn’t mean you’d be going for a hot beverage - It means she wants to go on a date. The answer of “No, I don’t drink coffee” is wrong, and you will regret it when you find out over thirty years later.
If I had the opportunity to relive my life, chalk me up as not interested.
First of all: I’m happy with how my life turned out. Took a while to get to where I wanted to be, but why roll the dice again if I’m happy with how they landed the first time?
Second: I’m 39 days from being retired. Why would I want to have to go through 40 years of working life again, when I’m about to be free from all that forever?
Third, maybe things could have worked out with this or that girl if I’d known what I was doing and taken the initiative. But nuts to that - I want to spend the rest of my life with this woman. And as much of a pain in the neck the Firebug can be at 16 years old, he’s the kid I love. I’m not trading him in for a hypothetical different set of kids I might have in a different run-through of my life.
So I’m all “why would I want to do that?” about this hypothetical opportunity.
But fourth, what about everybody else?? What happens to them if I go back 50+ years? I just wiped out a couple of generations of people born during that time. Hitler, Stalin, you were amateurs. And the people who were already living on the long-ago date that I returned to: I get to relive those years, but what about them? Have their memories been erased, or are they quite possibly frustrated by the lives they had lived that they’ve now been jerked out of? Seems like either way, this is a totally immoral thing to do.
Alternatively, and it’s something I’ve often wondered about, what if we were caught in a loop where we relive our lives with the opportunity to make better choices but no memories of the previous iterations, only vague hunches? In other words, we’d be reborn as exactly the same person, in the same circumstances but with some innate intuition of better choices we could make. I’ve sometimes been struck by how some things turned out exactly as I had felt they would although initially, it rationally seemed highly unlikely that it would be the case. Of course, it could be explained as self-fulfilling prophecies, but it’s still perplexing.
Of all the things I’d change in the list above, not embarking on a PhD progamme is by far my biggest regret. What if, back in mid-1996, when I realised that the topic I had chosen wasn’t very likely to get traction, I’d had a little voice in my head say “There are half dozen other linguistics professors here. Let’s knock on another door down the hall.” Some sort of gut feeling, if you will.
I would have stuck with the guitar lessons rather than giving up because it got hard. Learning it as an adult is fun and all, but to think how good I would have been by now. Same for learning Spanish - traveling in Latin America would be so much easier.
I would have not given up on my first career when I did. Turns out that would have lead to likely a more fulfilling, rewarding, and successful career rather than the job I settled on for convenience (that I have now and lament). If I just waited a couple-three more years.
I would work harder at forging closer relationships with extended family, and be more selective and explorative in potential mates rather than going with the first one that showed any interest in me.
I’m reading a web novel with this plot - a 60-year old is transported back to her 13-year old body. Things unwind almost immediately until her life is completely unfamiliar because she did simple things mentioned by others here; chiefly she just ate healthier and got some exercise.
Unless you don’t. There are people who do learn from their mistakes, and learn to avoid the same patterns. Those are the ones who would theoretically benefit from going back in time.
Wow, these are all interesting responses.
I know that life is lived moving forward and understood by looking back. So, I have to be careful not to live in the past and live a life full of regrets. We can all have regrets but I guess that doesn’t help us much in the present. It is just fascinating to think about it and look back at the choices we made and wonder how things could have been “different” (better or worse we’ll never truly know) had we made different choices.
I loved the movie “The Family Man” with Nic Cage and Tea Leoni. One of my christmas favorites. Life is always a trade of some sort. When you choose one thing, you are simultaneously not choosing everything else. It’s both such a scary and intriguing thing to wrap your head around.
There’s a fork in your life every minute, and each fork has a thousand branches. You pick one and 999 are foreclosed forever.
Damn good thing you left work for home at 5:14pm and missed that first traffic light on Mar 22nd, 2019. Had you left at 5:15 or made the light, you’d have been T-boned and killed 2 intersections later.
Not exactly the situation you mentioned, but the book Replay, by Ken Grimswood is an interesting look at such a cycle. The only spoiler is he has his former memories when he restarts. It’s surprisingly good, with some interesting twists/takes on the subject. Sometimes funny too, like his new wife’s fury upon discovering he invested all their savings with two unknowns named Jobs and Wozniak.
For me, I’m pretty sure I’d make most of the same mistakes again, unless I had complete memories of my first go 'round. In fact, I can remember several events that turned out well despite the odds, and I’d be afraid to repeat those again. Fate might not be so kind the second time.
I’m a firm disbeliever in the clockwork universe, so I would take any ‘reliving’ as having no chance of my life being anything resembling ‘the same as before’. Maybe Berkshire Hathaway still does well, but maybe IBM doesn’t give a contract to that Gates kid. Could I even get a chance to meet my wife, or would a thousand things change so we never met? Could I find her without looking like a stalkery creep? I mean she liked me the first time around, in part, because I wasn’t a stalkery creep.
If I remembered my first life, I’d be a 50+ year old college educated man with 25 years business experience in a 10 year old body. I’m not exactly likely to enjoy spending my afternoons playing Donkey Kong and D&D. I’d probably start some sort of business for myself, earn some money in my non-school time, because school will be a walkover. Save up, invest in things that look like they succeeded before, and hope for the best, maybe I get to retire young.
I also have a feeling that dating girls ‘my own age’ will be weird as hell. Ew. No. Gah.
That’s really the hard part.
We make decisions on the basis of the info we had / have at the time. Sometimes we make a well-founded decision and sometimes we make what the available evidence suggests is a poorly-founded decision. Or sometimes even have to decide in the near-total absence of any evidence at all.
Whichever we do, some percentage of those come out good anyhow, and some percent turn to crap anyhow. Making “better” decisions is not a guarantee of better results. It bumps the odds … some. how much? Hellifino.
Right. Maybe “different” would be the better way to think about it. If something you did has turned out less than or worse than you expected, then something “different” in that regard “could” be better. We’ll never know, but the idea of just “different” is tantalizing enough - it’s like any decision we make - would you want to roll the dice on that again?
“Sensitive dependence on initial conditions” is the chaos theory phrase, IIRC, and probably every life is a case study in it to some extent. Mine certainly is.
The only other problem is that you would also have a 10-year-old brain, and spending the morning losely supervising my 13-year-old son and his friend, and they are nothing like 50+ year old men. I’m not sure that transplanting a college education and experience would override adolescence.
Since real soon we’ll be dating other high schoolers we’d better hope it doesn’t. The only way to handle that much concentrated clueless enthusiasm is to meet it with equally concentrated enthusiastic cluelessness.
One question in these ‘go back and relive your life’ is, starting at what age? You wouldn’t want to come back in the body of your 3 year old self with your full knowledge, experience, and memories from well into your adult life. Can you imagine the frustration? Hell, 10 would still be way too early. I’d say 14 at the earliest, and even then I’d be dropping suggestive remarks around potentially frustrated housewives rather than trying to hit on 14 year old girls who would seem like children to me.
As always, it sort of depends by what we’re imagining we’re retaining. Specific memories of book knowledge, people we knew or were married to, who won the World Series in 1980, etc.? Or just the more mature and nuanced thought processes we call wisdom, which are essentially the distillate of all those decades of experience. I recall rather little of the details of my college classes, nor of most of my subsequent life. But the overall experience of being me for 65 years now has imparted a lot of wisdom. Or so I like to think; I still do stupid shit more often than I’d prefer.
If rewound to age e.g. 10 or 14 with 60-something wisdom and only that wisdom, but no explicit memories, maybe you’d just be more insightful and more calm than your peers. Novel (to youthful you) stuff like kissing or discovering foreign languages would still be novel to you; you’d just experience them in a more mature frame of mind than your peers do.
Kinda like being the smartest kid in the class is different from being the dullest or one of the average ones.
I recall a corny SF book I read as a teen. I don’t remember the title, but someone may recognize it. As best I recall, and this is fuzzy …
The protagonist is an ordinary guy living his ordinary life and suddenly he’s returned with full memory to being himself again as a tween. Same bedroom, same sibs, same everything. Except a moment ago he was a 50ish business dude with a wife and young children himself.
He struggles mightily under his new kidly restrictions. As soon as he earns some small seed money he cleans up financially since he knows what games to bet on and which companies to invest in early. By age 30 he’s a real tycoon. But the later in life he goes, the less like his remembered first pass the current (second pass to him) world is. So his historical knowledge becomes increasingly useless and misleading even as his experience and wisdom is growing.
He gets to the same age as last time, and ka-pow, he’s back to being a tween. He tries the same trick and this time the world spins out of control. Lather rinse repeat for several go-arounds. Akin to the plot of Groundhog Day but the cycle is ~40 years long, not 1 day. And instead of the protagonist getting more skillful at playing the world, the world gets more weird and unplayable.
After a few repeats he realizes there are a couple dozen other people on Earth stuck in the same loop, although not all on the same schedule. etc. He grows to dread his death/recycle day which he knows is coming … again. Shit got weird from there, and the book was ultimately unsatisfying at least to me. But thought provoking.
The relevant point to my post is the difference between historical factual knowledge and the very different idea of accumulated wisdom. Wisdom being the skill of how to react to unexpected events and live a good life come what may.
I see it very differently. Wisdom arises from all those granular particulars in one’s life, and the process of reflecting on and learning from them. I am still seeing things about by long-ago teen years in new ways, a half-century or more later.
Separated from those particulars, and the ability to reflect on them swept away, what foundation does wisdom rest on? It would have none; it would disintegrate like a cloud on a sunny day. Look at dementia patients; to what extent does wisdom survive the loss of memory? Not very well, as best as I can tell.