I’ll take the money, honey.
I had a fine childhood, but being an adult is so much better than being a kid. Adults have more responsibility, but kids have no freedom.
Also, I’m not convinced that “the world ahead” is going to be all that great. I don’t see us as living in a shiny, happy, Jetsons-like future.
$$$, no question.
I’d have to pass up knowing Lady Chance and the kids. And that’s worth just about everything to me.
I was accepted, but didn’t go, to Harvard. Instead I went to a small state school. Occasionally I’ll have the ‘my life would be easier if’ about heading to Boston for school at eighteen but it ALWAYS comes back to some complicated caper about road tripping to Frostburg to ‘accidentally’ meet Lady Chance.
So anything that removes her from the equation is a non-starter.
It’s not even a question. Basically you’re saying, "Die and be reincarnated at 5 or get $1.5 million. I have no real interest in the money but I have less in losing myself. They only way I take being 5 again is if I’m 5, with my memories.
What would be the point of being 5 if you had no special knowledge? If I knew and truely understood the power of compound interest when I was five, well then, I might take it but nope, show me the money.
I’d take the 5 year old option. Not a drug addict.
That wasn’t one of your options. Your five-year-old self has no special knowledge or memories, so your reincarnated self has just as great a chance of becoming a drug addict as anyone else. Or perhaps greater, if you subscribe to the theory that certain people are genetically predisposed to addiction, and believe yourself to have such a predisposition.
Hmm!
So far TWO took re-life at five (GUT & wolfman).
36-ish say Go for the Money. That’s ninety-five %!
Because of the ridiculous ratio between ayes and nays,
does that mean there is a correct answer
and the answer is to take the money? (Discounting outrageous circumstances, of course.)
You can add me to the list of people who don’t understand why. Put me back at 5 YO with no change and why wouldn’t I make all the same mistakes again? All the same things are going to happen to me?
Now, put me at, say, 15. And I need some knowledge of the future. And you know what? I bet a lot of humans still make the wrong choices, but some of them might be right this time around.
Otherwise, I’m only 31 and can do a lot with the money in the next several years.
I’d take the money. I wouldn’t even want to be five again if it meant going back in time with all my memories instead of a reincarnation scenario. I’ve had a good life overall, and while there are some regrets, there’s a chance that trying to fix my (and other’s) mistakes would make things even worse in the long run.
I’d be interested to know which choice you’d make, because I can’t see the upside of the childhood option. Unless you had a horrible family that you blamed for your current lot in life and would like to see how you’d fare with an “average” family, or something.
An interesting poll would be the choice of the money or the chance to change one event that directly affected own life-without having to start over from scratch.
Just thinking about this - it’s a pretty weird pair of choices, isn’t it? It’s a bit like asking: “which do you prefer; November, or oranges?”
To spin my original question a bit, what if this offer were truly made to you many many years ago (when you were then 64) and you rejected the money and chose to return to five years old (discounting those uber-precocious pre-five year olds who can remember their 0-5 maturation).
Now, today, you are who you are, knowing just for this moment of the choice you made;
would you say you made the correct decision?
[I am starting to get a headache.]
How can this be answered without knowing who I was before the memory-wipe? I mean, I’m reasonably happy being me (but what choice is there anyway?), but what 64-year-old was destroyed to make the 5-year-old me?
I’ll take being able to start over even if I don’t have my memories. I can make the money. When I started reading I was shocked that anyone would consider taking the money.
Wow. Was I in the minority.
Hmm It really is amazing to me that I’m so far in the minority here. So let me try to say a few things to explain.
I do believe in a self outside my body here and now. Not to get into a religious debate, or start nailing down things like soul, but I do believe ‘me’ is still me in the scenario.
I also have a lot of really detailed really long dreams. I have lived 10,20, sometimes 50 years into the future in crazy dreams. I have woken up totally freaked because I didn’t recognize my bed since I had clear memories of spending the last 15 years living in a cave hiding and fighting the alien invaders(Yes, My brain writes a lot of these future dreams in baaaadd science fiction, (I should tell some of them here sometime), but it still feels like a whole life in the framework of the dream’s reality), and it took several hours to remember who I actually was. I have woken up after having died as an old man, and remebering most of that life, that one was really freaky, took me several days to get my head straight. And I was having those types of dreams before I was 5.
Before anybody start’s fitting me for a tinfoil hat I’m not claiming any past lives, or collective unconscious, or recieved memories or anything. They were simply dreams from my very odd subconscious. And I’m sure I’ve had dozens or hundreds of dreams about ‘my life’ that I didn’t wake up during, so were lost without any memory whatsoever.
So that’s what it simply seems like to me. If I went back to 5, what I’m losing would simply be another dream of a life, henceforth to be forgotten.
I’m another who’d take the do-over. Even knowing that I’ll remain the same, and probably continue to make the same mistakes as I’ve made in this lifetime, I’d be hoping, too, that with some of the changes in society, and in particular medicine, other people affecting my life may well be able to keep me from fucking so very thoroughly.
Of course, at this point, the difference between me and someone who’s actively suicidal is largely Catholic programming.
Have you made a thorough job of fucking this time then?
er…
That was supposed to be “fucking up.” Ooops.
And actually, no. Quite the opposite. Which is just one of the problems. 
Kindly discount my last post. Upon reread it sound ridiculous. I blame it on being over caffeinated . Thanks.
The original OP is still operable…and my headache is getting worse.
I choose November.