If it’s like Ground Hog Day. I’d be very annoyed with everything repeating. The song on the clock radio. And other things.
To keep me sane. I’d pick 20 years. Just so I wouldn’t notice the repeating events as much.
I think I’d go for something like a month.
My reasoning is that I could liquidate all of my investments in a week or two, and then go totally wild spending it for a week or two. Too much longer than a month and I’d either have to work or be frugal. Too much less than a month and I couldn’t get to my money quickly enough to fully enjoy it.
I like working, but I would be really bummed out by the idea of having a whole career reset. I just know myself in this area. A big enough setback can cause me to give up on a project altogether because I simply can’t motivate myself to redo it.
With 12,000 one-month cycles, that’s enough time to experience just about everything the world has to offer right now without spending a lot of time building or accumulating things that will be lost. I would do a lot of world traveling and spend a lot of time learning languages, I imagine.
On additional reason for picking a short period: I don’t need to worry too much about keeping track of what’s history and what’s future. After enough loops, I could imagine making mistakes like thinking 2035’s events come before 2015’s events; that’s how it would be experienced by me, but not by the rest of the world. By the end of the cycle, I’d have totally forgotten 2010, but it would still feel recent to the people around me.
This is assuming I know it’s happening. Go with something like 5 years. Live long enough to get a really big jackpot, a couple hundred million, on one of the lotteries, then memorize the numbers from the last pick before the winner. Then commit suicide.
I jump back to the start, that time doesn’t count, so I have 1,000 years, 5 years at a time, to figure out the best way to use my wealth to make the world a better place and have fun doing it.
One question: what happens to the cosmos after I loop? Am I participating in 1,000 parallel universes, or does the rest of the universe cease to exist when I loop?
Given the parameters, there’s no reason not to choose the maximum 20 year loop. If you get bored or completely screw things up just hit the reset button and start the next iteration early.
ETA: What would really suck is getting a week or month into the loop and discovering that you already have some incurable terminal disease.
Yeah, that would be pretty flippin’ terrible. On the other hand, you’d have an eternity to try to find a cure for it!
That’s the most insightful reading of the [del]project specifications[/del] rules yet.
ISTM if you want near-eternal hedonism you want real short cycles. If you want to do good in the world you want long cycles. Maximizing your personal growth is probably somewhere in the middle. 5-10 years each to become a karate master, a master woodworker, a PhD chemist, a lawyer, a city councilman, a criminal mastermind, etc.
I also agree it’d be real nice to repeat the correct age. Having, e.g. 10 year cycles at ages 20-30, 40-50, or 70-80 would each be very different experiences. Picking rightly for 1000 years might be harder than it at first appears. Like that other current what-if thread on things people say they want that they probably wouldn’t actually want once they tried it.
333 1/3rd years
Assuming I don’t go mad, I’d still be living a regular life the whole time, meaning I would be forming emotional bonds with people and living my life with them. I’d rather not have that interrupted as little as possible.
1000 years seems like it conflicts with the “loop” idea.
At 500 years, that means I’ll only have one reset, and I have to assume that every time there’s a reset it’s a major shock to your system. At 333 1/3rd years, I’ll get two resets during the loop, so I’ll have a bit more experience reacting to and handling the sudden change, for once I’m out of the loop.
Plus, it would be cool to see the future.
ETA: Oh, I didn’t see the 20 year limit. So 20 years, for the reasons above.
Doesn’t sound appealing at all. You would spend your time mourning the children, lovers, etc…you had. Children being the worst, since they would permanently cease to exist at the end of each loop.
I don’t think it would get old. Especially if you have some money on your bank account at the beginning of the period. You could visit most of the world once sex begins to get old, for instance (does sex ever get old?)
I was hesitating between periods ranging from one month to one year. Too short, you can’t achieve much, too long and you don’t have frequent enough restarts.
You convinced me with your seasonal argument. I’m signing up for one year.
I wouldn’t want to count on that. Suicide attempts fail all the time, and surviving one could be an extremely unpleasant experience.
Yes. But …
Unlike a real suicide, you know it’s not exactly permanent. So it’s less nerve-wracking. And like anything else, practice makes you better at it. Besides, out of 50 20-year cycles, how many do you think you’ll hose up that badly to decide to reset vice just wait it out.
I have no idea how many failed suicide attempts are successful attempts at failing to kill one’s self versus failed attempts to actually succeed at it. Would be an interesting number to have.
Given the caveat above, it’s even better. As I read it, if you suicide even a few minutes before the end of a loop, the entire loop doesn’t count. Immortality (of a sort), if you find you really want it after most of 1000 years.
This means you’re immortal if you want to be. Commit suicide just before the end every time, none of the time counts and you live forever. Eventually you’d want to stop, but the world is big enough that you could spend a lot more than a thousand years experiencing interesting things, I think.
Therefore, I see no reason to set it at anything less than the maximum twenty years, especially since each cycle could be reset at any point I want, unless I’m trying to get out of the loop (and if I am trying to get out of the loop, I think a 20 year cycle would keep me more sane than a short one). I’d spend the first few days of my first few cycles figuring out how to get rich immediately, before my actions can affect things that I would use to make me rich, so lotteries in that first week are ideal. Get the numbers, kill myself, start over, use the numbers.
I’m still at an okay age for 20 years, too, since I wouldn’t be too old at the end of each cycle, I could fully enjoy my 20 years when I choose to let the cycles go that long.
Furthermore, 20 years means you can do things that require a considerable amount of time. Build a company, do scientific research, whatever strikes your fancy. There aren’t that many things that require more than 20 years to come to fruition if you can iterate over and over until you smooth out the process so it’s efficient.
As a final note, suicide attempts only fail for people who are insufficiently committed to killing themselves. In this situation, there’s no reason not to have 100% commitment and take your time time and plan to make sure you do it right with no reasonable chance of failure.
The only danger of a 20 year loop, then, would be being imprisoned and put on some sort of suicide watch vigilant enough to keep a really, really committed person from killing themselves. That would make for a really sucky 20 years.
It would become a living hell. It’d be novel and exciting at first. Maybe the first 50 years. But then, you’d soon run out of novel experiences. At first, no new entertainment. Movies, music, television, books, technology. There’d only be so much new content before your loop reset, and you’d burn it all out (with the exception of a few classics).
So, then what do you do with your time? Romance? Sex and drugs? Education? Soon, even all that will become stale and boring (well, maybe not the sex).
After 100 or 200 years in, you’ll be desperate for something truly new. Something novel. You’ll be scaraping the bottom of the barrel of human experiences, probably until you go completely insane and rambling to people you’ve lived this X-year loop for 500 years now. Only half way through. It’d become serious hell.
So, if you pick a 1-year, you would have to live that year over and over again 1,000 times. Oh, the hell after the first 15 or 20 times. I’d go for the maximum 20-year loop to mitigate how many loops I must go through. 50 long loops as opposed to 1,000 short ones sounds more bearable to me.
Well, another benefit of the 20 year loop vs. something short is that things won’t be the same. The first few years of the loop will probably be near-identical, but after that…things will diverge, almost certainly, due to your own actions rippling outward into the world. Some movies take years and years to get the rights for and everything else, but many movies go from concept to script to production to release in less than five years.
So, five years into your loop, things will have started to diverge. Even moreso if you personally make an impact on the world, by say, using your knowledge of the first few weeks, which should be pretty stable, to make a ton of money and invest it into a major thing. Hell, you could make an interesting experiment almost purely out of studying just how much of a butterfly effect there really is. Test and see how far things stay exactly the same, and how soon randomness starts to intrude. How much of a difference does timing make?
Not to mention there’s more books in existence already than can be read by a single human in a thousand years. Start reading things you haven’t read. Go learn another language and see entertainment from another culture’s point of view. You may have seen most of the American movies, but have you seen most Chinese movies? Korean? French? German? Swedish? Etc…
And, each time through your loop, you can try to bring advancements forward. What happened in the last 2 years of your 20 year loop? What new, interesting technologies developed? Well, you can get into those fields next time around and learn about how to make them. Then the next time after that, you can personally introduce and accelerate that field of technology, and by the end of the loop, developments will have gone past the original loop. If you keep doing it, you could see just how far advancement in a particular field can be taken in 20 years if you bring future knowledge with you.
You can also learn if those new, interesting technologies will flop if introduced at the ‘wrong’ time. What happens if you introduce Facebook at a different moment, for instance? Does it flop? Do we end up with something different?
I don’t think that’s the scenario. What he means is that you can’t cut your 1000 years short by suicide. If you had 1 year cycles and died after 1 month, that’s 1 month off your 1000 years, not 1 year, and not zero.
Your POV indicates a startling lack of imagination.
1000 years is only ~20x a normal human active adulthood. Are you seriously suggesting that there are only 20 worthwhile “scripts” to be lived on the entire planet? In all of humanity? Once you’ve done those 20 you’ve done all it’s possible (or at least worthwhile) for a human to do?
If someone’s idea of being human is watching the latest sitcom, then yes, the 50th time that person looped back and anxiously tuned in for the premier of “Seinfeld” (sigh) again (sigh) that would be pretty boring to them. Hint: that person is doing it wrong whether they’re going around life once or 50 times.
I’m almost 58. I’ve seen over 20,000 sunrises. Haven’t seen too many boring ones yet. Tomorrow’s, assuming I’m here to see it, will be unique and special too.
Heck, after each 20 year reset one could promptly move to a different state in the US and live out your cycle there, immersing yourself in each of the 50 local cultures. Maybe MO and KS aren’t too different. But AK, FL, and ME sure are. Be a New Yorker. And an Alaskan. And an Ohioan.
If one was more adventurous one could be a Yorkshireman. Then a German. Then a Thai. Sure, under the likely rules of the game you’d still be an expat of your original native country but plenty of people “go native” despite being expat.
20 years, longer if I could get it.
The perfect scenario, to my mind, would be 80 year loops that allowed me to live my whole life beginning to end again, starting around age four.
With 20-year loops I’d have time to see a long-term project to fruition, and to benefit from connections and deep friendships. Those of you choosing short loops need to consider the ramifications of 1000 years without anyone who knows you well. Yikes!
I’d especially like to be able to start the loops when I was 20 years old. That way, at the end of each loop I could test different methods of ending the North Korean regime, without the fear of spending decades in one of their hellish work camps.
What you’re looking for is The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. 
The more I think about it, the more I need to know what happens at the end of each loop. Do the people in the loop all cease to exist at the moment that hte loop ends? Because that might drive me insane with worry, or just insane with a lack of consequences. Do I watch my two lovely children grow up and then, in their mid-twenties, die along with everyone else? Or do I cut off contact with them for the first 49 loops, only maintaining family life in the final loop?
If they don’t cease do exist, do I? Or do I bifurcate at the moment of looping, one of me continuing to exist in the world and the other restarting the loop? If I cease to exist, is a body left behind? Do others remember me?
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Do I remember each loop? Because if I don’t then a 1-minute loop would pass in a blur.