I’m not sure dementia patients are a perfect benchmark, since lots more than just their memory is going wrong upstairs. But overall your point is well-taken. We don’t know exactly how the brain does “wisdom”, but if you kicked the foundational memories out completely, wisdom might well fade not long thereafter.
For a magic “do-over” on life, we can posit darn about anything and just declare that that’s how it works. For this thread. If somebody wants a different hypothetical universe with different do-overs in it, just create a new thread.
One of the points of the book I mentioned, but didn’t detail, was that the world got weirder as more of the do-over people tried their hand at impactful changes. And did not coordinate their work since there was pretty much no way for them to find one another.
So pretty quickly memories of the world as it was in earlier run-throughs became functionally useless. And yes, you could remember your e.g. last 3 lives’ spouses and kids and houses, but how much did / do those particulars help you now? Those people do not exist on this run-through. Which meant that except for pathos value, those memories too had no predictive or decision-making value. They were part of the source material of your total wisdom even if they gave you no useful clue on today. Make the bricks small enough and they’re indistinguishable from the mortar.
How is this for more normal people? I ask because I had acute PTSD from childhood abuse and it wasn’t for decades and decades that I was able to be more “normal.”
I know for me, that as a teenager learning coping skills to deal with the intense stress and depression would have made my life completely different.
I think a lot of people would benefit from maturity, even not for extreme cases like mine.
I don’t know. I suppose the point of these thought experiments is that you get to change decisions you made in the past or do thinks differently than you did so you maybe end up in a more rewarding career, better relationships, or whatever. The problem is you are still “you”. It’s not like you get to go back and relive your life as Tom Brady.
True, but while you are still you, presumably, everyone else is also still the same. So, you can apply the knowledge you have now on a setting in the past; knowing to stay away from so-and-so, or to pass-up that promising-sounding job that turned out to be crap.
Sorta. You’re certainly not turning into Tom Brady. But the terms of the OP are:
… what are some things you’d do differently in your second life now that you have learned all the hard life lessons in your first?
So the 17yo you this second time around has the potential benefit of another 40 or 50 years of you having learned what works well and what doesn’t. The OP also outlawed the easy stuff like bet on the World Series, buy HP, Apple, & Microsoft early, etc.
There’s a lot of 65yo me that 15yo me would (ruefully) recognize and vice versa. There’s also a lot that’s different. And I think old me is more capable of making good decisions, or at least avoiding stupidly-based ones. Despite the more skilled intentions of old me or do-overing me, Lady Luck will always get her licks in, both good and bad. So no guarantees of great success; we’re just loading the dice a bit this second time around.
As I mentioned upthread, a different OP could have different rules for its magic do-overs. But for this one it seems pretty clear to me.
I would have worked really hard to move abroad.
I have a happy life and I love my husband but I really wanted to try living somewhere else and learn new languages and new cultures. I am an immigrant already, once over. I’d definitely try Europe and maybe even try to move more inside Europe, if I could. I somehow got the idea that living here was the only way.
But you know, I am saying this from a perspective of a happy life. I have not forgotten how desparately lonely and unloved I felt as a teenager and a young woman, and so I sought love above all - and got it. Would I be able to overcome that a second time and accept loneliness for even longer?
Right, I was never going to be Tom Brady, but I now recognize I had the potential to be more what I call “socially mainstream” than I was, and that’s what I would do. When I was a kid/teenager/even young adult, I thought I was going to be “rewarded” someday for being a shy, socially awkward nerd, and that the people I thought of as “the bad kids” (e.g., the jocks and cheerleaders) were going to be miserable failures. Well, today, I have a good job, that’s not a problem, but it turns out most jocks and cheerleaders grow up to be normal, happy, healthy, well-adjusted people. Many of them have families, something I have never accomplished.
So, if I could do it over, I wouldn’t identify as a nerd. I’d play a sport, go to parties, date in high school and go to my prom, maybe pledge a fraternity in college, etc.