Jason K. Pargin does a daily vlog where he reacts to things, seemingly mostly from reddit, and it can be a fun watch to hear him discuss stuff. A couple of weeks ago he covered one of those classic Engagement Bait Would-You-Rathers:
In case you have no interest in clicking that link or for some reason cannot, the choice is… WOULD YOU RATHER
- Get $2 million USD (tax free) instantly OR
- Go back to 10-years-of-age with your current knowledge and have to relive your life?
Pargin argues, as I would almost immediately, that you want to take the money and not look back.
In the comments, though, several people bring up some of the classic reasons why someone might want to live their life again:
…you have nothing you really care to hold on to…
…you lost someone important and want to see them again…
…there’s some deep trauma somewhere…
…you have lost so many important things that re-rolling the dice just makes sense because you might get another shot.
And even reading those I would say that unless you are talking about a single, specific trauma that you could truly impact by redoing something…most of the reasons don’t necessarily strike me as actually compelling.
This is based on a few assumptions by myself:
- Since you are retaining all your memories, you are taking the lived trauma with you even if you “fix” it.
- There is absolute NO reason to assume everyone around you would make the same choices. In other words, if you assume everyone will be beholden to your will while you fuddle in the wonderland of your own past mistakes, you are being far too self-centered and that’s me being polite.
- e.g., your ex-wife you want to try again with might not even be there at the same bar and might have hooked up with her high school sweetheart.
- Even something like your favorite park to stare into the distance as you hate yourself might not be built in this new timeline.
- Children, jobs, and everything that requires a monumental amount of chance and random luck to make work well are all just gone as something like a continuation of above but a very important one.
- If you have a lifetime of regrets and poor decisions, going back to “fix them” probably won’t work out in your favor any more so than just moving forward. You will still have to endure everything that led to those mistakes in the first place except now you are in the funhouse mirror version of them all.
- And…finally, depending on a lot of factors, your life at 10-years-old is a fairly powerless one even with future knowledge.
You know what, no, fuck it. I’ll one up my second point. If you are going back in time and rewriting EVERYONE’S choices just so you can get dumped again for being a selfish bastard, you are a terrible person.
Jerk.
Take the money, shithead.