If you were given the opportunity to see what your life could have been like based on different decisions you have made, would you do it?
I would, but there would have to be a way to erase it from my memory.
I´ve made some mistakes in my life. I can´t tell if my life would be better if I had or had not done certain things in certains times, but I am sure that I wouldn´t had suffered some old consecuences…
Anyway, I would be more interested in peering my life I I was born in a complete different place, or ina complete different time, raised by complete different parents… now that would be interesting. The other things are easier to imagine, I guess…
Sometimes I think about where I’d be if I had gotten good grades- if school came easily to me and I had the attention span to study for hours at a time, write decent papers with good research methods, take free college classes that were offered to me in high school, etc. I guess I think about this a lot because I have a cousin a year younger than me whose in grad school right now studying Entymology and I haven’t even finished my B.A. yet. Or my other cousin who is taking Calculus as a summer course in High School at an age that I couldn’t even wrap my head around Algebra… 
So in a way I already do this, I think about where I’d be if I was really as smart as everyone thinks I am. But then I look at my own life really carefully too, and while being smarter might mean I have a higher standard of living, or some additional piece of paper regarding my academic status, right now I am prettty happy, and I’m not that worse off taking the choices I made.
Like Incubus, I already kinda do this, it helps me get to sleep sometimes, imagining the “might have beens.” Sometimes it turns out okay and other times it doesn’t. But to answer the OP, yes, I would like to see it. If something really great happened in the alternate life that I had some control over (such as education, location etc…) then I could always implement that change and hope for the best, spurred on by that alternate life.
Like Incubus, I already kinda do this, it helps me get to sleep sometimes, imagining the “might have beens.” Sometimes it turns out okay and other times it doesn’t. But to answer the OP, yes, I would like to see it. If something really great happened in the alternate life that I had some control over (such as education, location etc…) then I could always implement that change and hope for the best, spurred on by that alternate life.
I’d love to know. I just think it would be really interesting!
Happens to me all the time…
If such a thing could be done, I’d do it. I speculate quite a bit on where the major crossroads in my life have been and what might have happened if I’d taken the other road. There’s no way to know where the next fork on those other roads would have come, so making too big a deal about the ones you did take can be difficult to evaluate.
I can identify several major places where big changes came. But I would bet that so many of the really significant alternatives pass us by with little fanfare. Attitude shifts, minor acquaintances, chance encounters, something as simple as whether or not we saw a particular movie, heard a specific song, read a particular magazine article or went to a specific restaurant, may each have contributed to where we are today. I think it’s little things cumulatively and not big things suddenly that direct our traffic through life.
But I’d be willing to watch a rerun of my life where different turns would have led to a significantly different outcome.
How early in life do you think those “missed opportunities” begin?
Absolutely, positively YES – and I wouldn’t want it erased from my memory either. I’d much rather have the ability to think and compare the “might have beens” to what I actually did.
No. I agonized over some decisions in my life quite sufficiently while I was actually making them, I really wouldn’t like to be second-guessing myself that way … I’m content to live the life I’ve got, with the consequences, good or bad, of the choices I made.
I’d like to go the whole “It’s a Wonderful Life” route and see what the lives of people I know would be like had I never been born. If it turns out I’m completely pointless or me being born made everyone worse off, then I’d like my memory wiped.
I think it would be great, just so you could pursue a completely different route in life and see how it ends up. I would probably drop out of school and dedicate all my time to music to see if I have what it takes to make it as a full time musician.
I sometimes think about what my life would have been like had my family not moved when I was a kid. I was born in San Francisco and when I was eight, we moved to a suburb. It was only 35 miles, but for a kid who’d only lived in the city, it was major culture shock.
On the whole, I probably lucked out. I certainly got a better education than I would have had I stayed in the dismal SF public schools. I grew up in a house, with my own room, and a backyard instead of a tiny apartment, sharing a room with my sister. Still, I sometimes wonder how things would have turned out, if I’d be the same person I am now.
Absolutely yes! I’d loved to know how my life would have been diffent if I had say, stayed at my old college, put off school for a year like I wanted to, even what would have happened if I had admitted to my high school crush how I felt. There are a lot of things that would be interesting to see “done over”.
I would definitely NOT want to know. Maybe that is because right now I am at a very difficult period in my life that relates to a decision made years ago, and knowing it would have been better otherwise would be obvious but would feel horrible. Sorry if that’s TMI.
Yeah, I think so. Fortunately, I don’t have any regrets, so that’s easy for me to say …