Then as of today, I would probably pass. ETA: I imagine that most parents would feel the same way.
Although it would be pretty sweet to get a chance to re-live life with all of one’s accumulated knowledge and experience.
My view would change if there was some terrible disaster like the Holocaust which I would be able to prevent from happening.
For myself, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I was a misfit child to begin with, I started kindergarten early, then skipped another grade, so I was always chronologically younger than all of my peers while still being more suited to conversation, in terms of interest and understanding, with adults. And this time around I’d have the knowledge and understanding to get the grades that went along with the prodigy status.
And getting to relive and reclaim the years with my dad – especially now with my knowledge of his other, secret family – and maybe fix that, and to have the years with my mom and grandparents again, too. That’d be great.
Knowing what relationships were worth seeking out again, and cultivating, and which were a waste of time? Priceless. Yes, bring it on.
My only hesitation is over this: what would happen to the events that I set in motion in this lifetime, and events in which my role made a meaningful difference? What about things I could subvert? It’s one thing for my memories and knowledge to be intact, but with them, I’d make different choices.
Could Tumbleddown Rebooted change the course of her everything by pushing her dad to the go the ER on the morning of May 10, 1984 version 2.0, throwing a complete brat fit, refusing to go to school, calling 911 herself if need be, so that he didn’t die on the kitchen floor that night from what may have been a preventable embolism? How does it effect ~50 year old Tumbleddown Rebooted (in the body of an 11 year old) if she does all that and her dad dies anyway?
Does the friend I probably wouldn’t have in v2.0 die because someone without my sense of direction is on the phone with the rural ambulance service, explaining how to get to where he was having an intractable asthma attack?
I wouldn’t attend the college I went to if I got a chance to relive my life. But I introduced two couples that got married and are still together with 7 kids between them. Would they all have their lives?
That’s a lot of responsibility to put on my shoulders, you know?
The main thing that makes me think twice at all (and still not enough to seriously hesitate) are the years spent before the internet appears. Those would be kind of frustrating.
But there’s so many things I could do better. Physically, I could stay active and not let myself get out of shape, something I’m still trying to resolve today (I used to participate in triathalons, and could have maintained a reasonable level of fitness). I could learn to be much less socially awkward, because I could start again with a focus on actually learning how to interact with people - and instead of avoiding interaction, I’d intentionally seek it out. I could work out other personal issues in a much more proactive manner, knowing the things that would be important later in life.
I could, of course, make a great deal of money by buying the right stocks, etc, setting myself up so I don’t have to work. The 24 hours to memorize thing is unnecessary (I’m sure even with my lack of specific knowledge there are any number of ways I could get rich with my general knowledge alone) but would be appreciated in that regard, as I could memorize a few specific dates and such to buy/sell stock on to maximize my gains. The moment I ‘appeared’ I’d write down as much as I could and keep it safe.
I’m not sure how many waves I’d want to make, though - I don’t know if I’d want to try to directly influence a lot of the technology that’s developed. I’d be afraid of ‘ruining’ something. I don’t know enough about the stuff to develop it myself (I suppose I could go into the right fields to do the development personally, but that doesn’t really interest me so much) so I’d want to minimize the chances of something I do resulting in, say, Google never existing.
Yes, it could be called ‘Mnemnosyne’ instead. Not as catchy, granted.
Or ‘Mnemnosyne Book’, or you get my drift.
Yes, with a great deal of hesitation. The chance to start over with an adult’s more level-headed approach to the world is a pretty heady inducement ( not to mention the near-guaranteed life of relative comfort and success ).
But I’d truly be worried that it would turn out to be a de facto Monkey’s Paw sort of deal. The potential loss of cherished relationships is one thing. But even beyond that as others have alluded I think there is a real possibility that an adult mind trapped in a toddler’s body might actually cause me to go insane over a period of time. Or at least fuck me up badly, enough to cripple me emotionally in some way. I think I’m very level-headed and sane generally, but I just can’t predict how hellish that situation could turn out to be. Maybe not at all - maybe I’d have a blast from the get go. But it is a worrisome thought.
Hell no.
To clarify, I agree with this. My experiences, good and bad, made me who I am and brought me to this place in my life. I wouldn’t trade that (and especially not my husband and kids) for anything.
No, I wouldn’t do it. Sure there are a lot of things I wish I could have changed at the time** if **the result would still lead me here, to the happy life I have now.
I would have let the childhood sweetheart move to New York with her parents and just said goodby. Instead I followed, came back home and she followed me. We got married and discovered we were just young and didn’t really have much in common or any common goals. A big waste of time, but what would I have done instead?
I would have avoided the second wife like the plague. Unfaithful drug addict who left me with 2 young boys to raise alone. But then I wouldn’t have the fine sons I have now, so would I have suffered through it all knowing the eventual outcome? Or not have 2 of the most important people in my life exist? I’d have to go through it all again anyway.
And I couldn’t just skip ahead to my current, wonderful wife because she was 4 years old when I started college. People would talk and stare.
There are many other regrets I wish I could fix, but each step alters the path you are on. I don’t know where I would be if I fixed all the mis-steps, but it wouldn’t be here, and I like it here.
I was about to post a similar poll, but its title was, “If you could avoid a devastating train wreck, would you do it?”
Absolutely.I’d probably land in “me” aged 5 yrs at the start of my kindergarten class. Orange and brown wide stripped shirt, sitting on the carpet of Mrs. Buckovic’s class. I’d grab some paper and write down the pertinent information. It’d take some time to set things into motion. There were no multimillion dollar lotteries in 1975, so I’d have to bide my time. When the moment is right, I’d plunk my dollar down for that ticket. Take the winnings and put them into the appropriate stocks.
Once I had myself set and my family paid off to leave me alone (and told my mother to head the cancer that would claim her in 1986 off at the pass) I’d head south.
I know where my husband grew up. I’ve visited his childhood home many times. His family loves me now, so I know I’d be able to charm them at a younger age… If I could have skipped some of the mistakes of my youth and got to be with the love of my life 10 years earlier than fate brought us together in this timeline? Yes. Without hesitation.
Absolutely. There are MAJOR things I’d do differently . . . and as a child, I’d know how to deal with my father.
I wouldn’t be able to take my partner with me, but I’d know exactly where to find him again.
The problem I considered with this is thus: I don’t have all the expertise that the people who initially created these things had. I could theoretically try to make them ‘ahead of time’, but if my attempt fails, then it seems to me very likely that the failure of my attempt might serve to discourage whoever was ‘supposed’ to do it from trying.
The idea of making everything we have now only sooner and better is neat, but I suspect it would take more expertise to pull off than I have, and the attempt might make things worse in the trying. Better I think, to sit tight and gather my money as unobtrusively as possible so I can use it to improve things going forward, instead of risking messing up the stuff about the world that I already like.
I could perhaps carefully mess with things that didn’t turn out the way I would have preferred, though. Maybe I’d try and make Crystal Pepsi stay on the market somehow. 
No, and I don’t really understand why anyone would want to do so unless it were to save their younger selves from some horrible physical injury. A lot of other posters have talked about avoiding things I’d describe as psychological injury, but reliving your life and making different choices wouldn’t actually do that if you retain your original memories. It would, at best, create a different timeline where no one else was aware of your past bad experiences. That hardly seems worth spending a decade or more as an adult mind in a child’s body. My original childhood was bad enough in terms of being bored in school and not fitting in with other kids, and I was merely “gifted”. If I literally had the intellectual ability and knowledge of a college-educated adult it would be much, much worse.
I’d also be running a high risk of destroying the 20+ year friendship I’ve had with my childhood BFF. I’d have to spend years pretending to be interested in the games, TV shows, conversation topics, etc., we enjoyed as kids before she grew into someone who I could actually relate to again. I’d be lucky if she even wanted to be my friend if I always seemed sort of bored and condescending when we were growing up.
Like tumbleddown, I also have concerns about how much worse a timeline where I truly knew when and how my father would die but failed to save him would be than a timeline where my father was killed in a totally unforeseen accident.
You people are so narcissistic! It’s all about you, you you. 
What about the opportunity to change history? You could be a future-crime fighter! Go and beat the shit out of Ted Bundy before he goes on his rampage! Track down the Unabomber and blow up his stupid cabin! Stop the Oklahoma City bombing! Maybe even stop the World Trade Center attack (although that would be a more complex task).
So aside from revising your poor dating decisions, what more “macro” events would you try to change?
As an adult I rarely find myself in a semi-grownup conversation anyway. Adults are vastly more stubborn than children are, and trying to persuade an adult is like dealing with a 5-year-old saying “I know you are but what am I?” Adults are self-absorbed, set-in-their-ways people that don’t care a bit about anything you care about.
You can have an intelligent conversation with people of any age provided they are intelligent. The words might change but the meaning of the words used does not.
I’d go back in a second. Youth is wasted on the young. If I knew then what I know now my life would be vastly different, and a second chance would turn out very differently.
Why would you need to fit in at all? Think of it as a major head start on whatever new career you’d be interested in pursuing. School would be a breeze and the extra time could be spend making sure you got grants and scholarships to the school of your choice - assuming that you just didn’t want to make major money from your knowledge of future events. I’d combine the two and go into the sciences and fund my own research facility. The opportunities are endless. While I like the people I know now, I can make new friends and do different things.
Jeez, I think of all the time I wasted on girls, trying to fit in, and not having enough knowledge, opportunity or guidance on what I wanted to do with my life. Ugh.
This really makes me sad. Everyone’s siblings were horrible to them at some point. That’s just the way it crumbles, cookiewise. You couldn’t have just niced your way our of his depression.
Right? My mother used to call me “ma’am” when I was a little kid. It wasn’t until I older that I realized she was being sarcastic. I was a grown up in a little, tiny body.
Yup!
So of course it’s tempting to go back in time and avoid this or that mistake, make wise investments, circumvent your shitty ex husband, deliver that incisive comeback with flawless timing, but what kind of life is that? I like my life a lot right now, so while it’s easy to say “Had I known then what I know now,” I honestly don’t see that knowledge making me any happier. So although this proposal in many ways seems like a good idea, I’m going to have to pass.
I considered this (mostly as a side ‘well if I can while I’m at it’) thing, but I figure I’d have to be at minimum 10 years older to prevent anything that I can think of off-hand and would be significant. The 9/11 attack is the only one I would even come close to being able to affect, and it would require having very specific authority, which is implausible that I could obtain at my age in 2001. Nothing that’s both preventable and really significant has happened during the time I could probably affect. I suppose calling in a bomb tip on the Oklahoma City thing might have had an effect, but it wasn’t something I thought of off hand.
The 9/11 attack is probably the largest preventable event in the lifespan of most people who might be reading this, and even that would be very difficult, if not impossible to prevent. The only reasonably certain way I can think of to prevent that would be for the time-traveler to be the person in command that day at NORAD and thus it would be possible to use the future knowledge to scramble fighters to force those planes down before they reach populated areas. But even that might not be sufficient - I have no idea of the regulations involved and whether the person in charge at NORAD actually had authority to bring down civilian planes without certain evidence of their intentions. You might have to be the President to give that order. Alternately, you might try to catch the terrorists before they hijack the planes, but from what I know, a couple of them might have been overstaying their visas, but other than that you’d have no reason to hold them.
Because I’m not a robot? I am happy with my current career, and cannot imagine that I’d learn enough repeating school to make it worth spending many years with no friends, feeling constantly frustrated by the limits on my independence. I’ve already experienced a less severe version of that, and it was unpleasant enough that I don’t see going through it again just for an improved chance of winning the lottery. If I want to learn new things, get a new degree, or go into a new line of work, I can do that now, as an adult in the current timeline…with the additional bonus of not having to worry about the risks of disrupting history or dealing with the frustrations of not being able to disrupt history.
In the current timeline, school was a breeze and I did wind up with a full-tuition academic merit scholarship to the college of my choice. While I was definitely not popular K-12, I did go off to college with some experience interacting with people socially and having friends/being a friend to others. I made a number of very good friends in college, but I don’t think it would be easy to do this again if I’d spent the past 15 years or so in social isolation, spending the “extra time” that most people spend interacting with other human beings on additional studying and planning what I’d do with my future millions.
I was about to post basically this in response to Spoke’s question, but saw on preview you had already said it. Even calling Oklahoma City’s anonymous crime tips hotline or calling in a bomb threat to the Federal Building early on April 19, 1995 might not do much good. I think there’s a good chance that a call from someone who sounded like a kid wouldn’t be taken seriously. Even if it was, the information I’d be able to give the police might not be enough to allow them to arrest McVeigh before the bombing. If he was merely questioned before 4/19, or saw the bomb squad at the Federal Building that morning before leaving the truck bomb, he might decide to delay his plans or bomb some other building instead. I would have no advance knowledge of this other bombing since it didn’t happen in my original timeline, and for all I know it could wind up being even worse that the one that was averted.
Sorry, my argument wasn’t really about what would be good for you as that is your choice and I have no problem with it.
I too could have breezed through school - if my father didn’t move us so much. I changed school 7 times in the 10 years I was in school. I lost every friend I made growing up that I no longer bothered anymore. And every school change resulted in a restart and consequent step backwards to readjust to the new environment.
Then when he wasn’t drinking enough for everyone in this thread, he was beating my mother every weekend. I still hear her scream and plead with him to stop.
So, the only option I had was to join the military at 17 and get out. Because even if I could have done anything at that point physically, emotionally, it was impossible.
Years were then spent drifting until I realized that I had to change things and could change things.
I figure 20 years of my time on this earth has been wasted because of a drunkard. I found out in my late 30’s that I was adopted and my biological mother had been looking for me for years. I have a strong relationship now with her, my bio father (they separated when I was born), and the families on both sides. There is no reason to think that would change (or that I would initiate contact with them before they were ready for it).
Sorry, with the focus and knowledge that I have now transferred to when I was 5? A small body wouldn’t be an issue. There are always those who are bigger and stronger. It is the fear of the unknown that holds us back.