What if you could do it all over? (2020)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/what-if-you-could-do-it-all-over

by FinnLobsien • 1 year ago

57 130 1 year ago

n4r9• 1 year ago

glimshe3• 1 year ago

My life turned out alright. Full of problems, pains and questions like everyone's else's but, in the grand scheme of things, I'm incredibly fortunate given the amount of poverty and misery in this world.

I always liked the thought experiment of living my life again. However, I'm much more interested in the thought of living in the future. If I could do it again, I'd take the risk of living 1000 years from now. I know this could be a mistake, but I'm an optimist.

kgwxd• 1 year ago

It'd just be the same game in a different environment, with an inventory of items from a different tech tree.

glimshe3• 1 year ago

Do you think someone from 1025 would feel this way if they came here? Serious question.

i_love_retros• 1 year ago

people would still be trying to understand how to upgrade node dependencies

jajko3• 1 year ago

Maybe you are tech nerd so all the probable tech progress would amaze you. But unless you yourself would literally do time travel (and be treated like a primitive Neanderthal), your level of satisfaction would most probably be the same since all amazing and cool becomes a new baseline rather quickly, and curiosity and longing for next future would be there again.

We could also end up in millenia-spanning dictatorship of immortal piece of scheize egomaniacs like stalin, hitler, puttin', trump and so on and on. All of them would kill millions to achieve that, in a heartbeat with no remorse.

We could also destroy our ecosystem beyond easy repair and live in postapocalyptic mad-maxesque world (sure it will bounce back in a million years or two, but we would most probably be wiped out along the path). I look out of window on a dense beautiful wild forest in full bloom, doesn't get much better than that.

Nah, these are pretty good times we, most of us at least, have right now. If you are not happy now, chances of being happy some other time are slim.

glimshe3• 1 year ago

I'm happy now, but I have a more optimistic take. I believe that humanity could make progress in conquering unhappiness, disease or even death. While happiness levels possibly didn't improve as much as we expected in the last 1000 years, we did eliminate much misery in the world. Losing loved ones to diseases is bad, among many improvements we made. So, I think that in 1000 years, our descendants may be living in an objectively better world - possibly even without the gadgets we rely on so much for our happiness today.

mgh95• 1 year ago

I have always found this question haunting. I would imagine if I had the ability to forever banish a single though from my head, this would be it.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

Maybe an alternative perspective helps. If you could always do it over, an infinite redo so to say, nothing would matter. Every choice and outcome would become insignificant, because you could just redo it until it was just right. On the flip side, there's always going to be something that you miss out on, no matter how many times you could do it, some choices simply exclude other outcomes and you can't have both. The fact that you can't simply redo things is in a way what gives them value and meaning — what you choose matters.

westcoast49• 1 year ago

If you could always do it over, an infinite redo so to say, nothing would matter. Every choice and outcome would become insignificant, because you could just redo it until it was just right.

The movie Groundhog Day comes to mind.

CMCDragonkai• 1 year ago

Another way to think about this is playing a video game with cheats on. You get to infinitely restart until you "win". Life isn't really like that though. The win conditions in one life doesn't match the win conditions in other lives.

rxtexit• 1 year ago

I think it is that the alternate paths are just so easy to romanticize.

I have been doing this lately with how maybe I should have went into the military after high school.

Of course, the romanticized version doesn't include losing a limb in Afghanistan.

It just easy to take the good fortune that did happen for granted.

jmathai2• 1 year ago

Family and children eliminated thoughts of my “unlived” lives.

Life is hard. Focusing on gratitude helps me be thankful for what I have instead of thinking about what may have been.

anonzzzies8• 1 year ago

Never needed that: I like life because I know I will die soon and nothing I do matters. That is the thing I would've liked to know earlier.

y-curious• 1 year ago

So, why continue living? The nihilist pit is something I recommend you claw your way out of, ASAP.

xyzzy95634• 1 year ago

If you have children you can help continue a chain of humans millions or maybe even billions of years long.

vharuck• 1 year ago

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

- Kurt Vonnegut

more_corn• 1 year ago

The counterpoint to this is quite important. Sure, maybe nothing matters without someone there to make it matter. We are the only creatures in the known universe who believe in abstract universals (love, hope, truth, beauty, meaning as well as the negative abstract universals). Which means things only matter insofar as they matter to us. But obviously things matter to us.

If/when we disappear, meaning itself might get erased from the universe. In that sense nothing means anything.

In another sense, if we are the only source of meaning that’s potentially the most rare and precious thing imaginable.

Giving a shit is literally our superpower. So give a shit about something because meaning only exists when we bring it into being. And it only exists as long as we make it exist. Far from being depressing this might be the most uplifting thought possible. Because it makes you fucking matter. As much as you want to matter. (And as little)

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

I remember the "Beatle that got away" saying that "the best thing that happened in my life was to leave the Beatles, and I would never change that" (I don't remember the precise quote, but it was something along those lines). He then went on explaining how "if I was still with the Beatles he wouldn't have the kids he now has, and there is no price for that.

badc0ffee3• 1 year ago

This is basically the lesson in About Time (2013).

(I liked that movie)

rwmj2• 1 year ago

If you had perfect future knowledge (which is what this article is really about) you wouldn't want to invent Slack (or Google), which lets face it would have been a ton of work with a very uncertain outcome. You'd want to invest in Slack / Google at some early stage, do no work whatsoever, and enjoy the proceeds.

jeremyjh• 1 year ago

I'd probably join Slack early, successfully rail against Electron and kill the whole company.

charliebwrites• 1 year ago

And leave us with Microsoft Teams?

You monster

anonzzzies8• 1 year ago

Yeah, I would say most past life choices for me would be investing in the right things. If you know, then risk is not needed.

racl101• 1 year ago

Pretty much.

I always find it funny when people say: "I'd invent Google" when they could barely pass their first year Calculus class. As if stating the idea is all it took but not the engineering and well ... the actual difficult work.

But everyone can invest. That much is totally doable.

rwmj2• 1 year ago

Yup, by far the hardest bit is working out which 7 star ski resort to go to next. In this alternate reality you'd be cosplaying as a VC, because that would give you the creds to raise money and meet the right founders. But the only work you'd be doing is passing on pets.com, and choosing to invest in thefacebook.

tayo42• 1 year ago

The difficult work is easier to grind through when you know there's a pay off.

I think alot of people aren't passing calculus and doing hard work, not because they're dumb but there's no clear pay off, it's hard to stay motivated

badc0ffee3• 1 year ago

Do those people know what PageRank is? Even if they did, could they implement it? (And would they be able to come up with their own name for it, given they are not Larry Page?)

verzali2• 1 year ago

It would be a lot faster to buy a lot of lottery tickets, or become a professional gambler. Once you've done that you'd have enough to make meaningful investments for long term returns. Or to short the stock market before certain big events...

lnsru• 1 year ago

I stand for every decision I made even if they were not perfect from current perspective. I can compare starting conditions of other kids from same school and I must admit, I am doing amazingly well. I am pretty sure I don’t want it to do all over. The future is more exciting. It became clear, I can’t pull all alone patient monitoring startup and I need to do something simpler during the time I have. I rolled the dice and let’s see decade later if it worked out. It’s so exciting!

jajko3• 1 year ago

If one is happy where he currently is, there is nothing to change. All steps, positive or negative, along the path to present were mandatory building blocks of who we are now and why we are as we are.

I myself can clearly see that at least some some negative experiences helped me in long run. The key is that they needed to be bad enough to force introspection and change, but not devastating enough to just destroy everything beyond repair.

bigbacaloa• 1 year ago

I would be less of an a*** and a bit braver, but otherwise mostly the same.

futureshock• 1 year ago

I think the fantasy of going back hides the reality that new possibilities are always stretched out ahead. I have lived many lives. New careers, new cities, new countries, new friends, new families. By my count I’ve lived 14 iterations of life and counting. New lives are always beckoning. After awhile you get good a recognizing the ones worth stepping into.

owebmaster5• 1 year ago

I think the fantasy of going back hides the reality that new possibilities are always stretched out ahead.

It also hides the incapability of many to do what they should to succeed. Most people already know what they should do different to succeed without going back in time but still they do not have the will power to do it and they probably would still not have if they had a time machine.

MangoToupe2• 1 year ago

Ironically, I think characterizing life as a question of success-or-not was THE major barrier in my life to finding the contentment I was actually looking for.

jampekka2• 1 year ago

What do you mean by succeed? I find learning to not care so much about succeeding - at least in the usual criteria imposed by the society - is maybe the best thing I've learned since touch typing.

FinnLobsien5• 1 year ago

It's true that life can always evolve and change, new opportunities open, responsibilities appear, etc.

But in other ways it's not true. For example, there's no way to be 19 again and be in college, date the person who, looking back was clearly into you. Study the thing you really wanted to study (not what you thought would be best for your career), etc.

I think the fantasy of going back isn't about being unable to change, it's about "getting it right this time"

card_zero3• 1 year ago

Central to the plot of Back to the Future Part II (for some reason not referenced in the New Yorker) is the sports almanac with information about future results. Any fantasy of going back and getting it right hinges on this kind of transfer of knowledge back into the earlier situation. The problem is then whether the information is subtle enough to be interesting, that is, to prevent the fantasy from devolving into a mere cheat to get rich by knowing things in advance. In practice the time traveller would at least attempt to invest early in bitcoin, learn the skills that will be in demand, befriend the awkward person who is going to be cool and successful later, and other cheaty stuff.

I suppose a better fantasy would involve going back into a similar but rearranged situation, with all the variables and trends changed to prevent predictions.

nonameiguess• 1 year ago

Similar to the other top-level reply, without perfect foreknowledge, there is no way to know you're "getting it right this time." I dated the person into me and studied what I loved. We got divorced and I ultimately ended up with a person I didn't meet until I was 30. I had to go back to school and change careers later in life because the job prospects sucked for what I loved.

Given I ultimately ended up in a good place anyway, I don't even regret anything. The only thing you can't come back from is death. As long as none of your bad decisions kill you, I don't see much to fret about.

os2warpman• 1 year ago

For some people, imagining unlived lives is torture, even a gateway to crisis.

I was either born without the gene or raised to not do this for myself but I do, quite often, dwell on the unlived lives of people I knew who were never given the chance to live their lives.

My best friend was murdered at school when he was 16. In the Army there are several guys I considered to be "old men" at the time who I am now decades older than.

Now I'm the old man.

Others have taken their own lives or had it stolen from them by drunk drivers or disease.

But me? I just happily (for the most part) stumble through my own life, knowing the past is immutable.

The utility of "what ifs?" seems very low when looking at the past.

The present is a different story, but the convoluted fantasies people seem to build in their minds about going back and marrying that person or taking that risk seem futile because anything you create in your mind is as real and likely to happen as a myriad other options and knowing how that path would have unfolded is impossible.

"I would have been happier/better off/more X if only I.." No. That is unknowable.

Yeah. Go back in time and invest in a sure bet. You got fabulously wealthy and Very Important but ended up dying in your comfy first class seat sitting next to the cofounder of Akamai on 9/11.

"No with my time machine only good things happen"

richev• 1 year ago

Very sorry for the loss of your friend.

keepamovin• 1 year ago

Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town. We made Web sites and software for an early dating service, an insurance-claims-processing firm, and an online store where customers could “bargain” with a cartoon avatar for overstock goods. I lived large, spending the money I made on tuition, food, and a stereo.

In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big. A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers: Slack, avant la lettre. It was a huge project, entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity. We were terrified that we’d taken on work we couldn’t handle but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative. We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo, which we built. Newly confident, we hired our friends, and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “business dinner” at Nobu. Unlike other kids, who were what—socializing?—I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. After my client work was done, I’d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops. Often, I slept on the office futon, waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock, where a homeless man lived with his cart.

I liked this entrepreneurial existence—its ambition, its scrappy, near-future velocity. I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech. I saw a path, an opening into life. But, as the dot-com bubble burst, our client’s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn’t want what we’d made. Our invoices went unpaid. It was senior year—a fork in the road. We closed our business and moved out of the office. A few days before graduation, when I went to pay my tuition bill, a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation, then got off at her floor; on my ride down, she stepped on for a second time, and our conversation continued. We started dating, then went to graduate school in English together. We got married, I became a journalist, and we had a son. I now have a life, a world, a story. I’m me, not him—whoever he might have turned out to be.

Damn, that was a good opener.

anonzzzies8• 1 year ago

I wouldn't want to but if I could I would move away from the city much younger. At birth if I could arrange.

theletterf• 1 year ago

I would live life exactly as I've lived it so far. The thought of my kids not existing in an alternate universe is too painful to endure.

xtiansimon2• 1 year ago

What’s that rule about question titles?

No. unless you also change my starting conditions.

verzali2• 1 year ago

One day I'm going to write an article headlined "Is Betteridge's Law Correct?" and watch the heads of people like you explode.

xtiansimon2• 1 year ago

Let’s hope for us both my head does not explode due to any action on your part.

matwood• 1 year ago

There's a great book called Replay that tackles the ground hog day problem but at a life scale. I read it every few years and it always gives me some perspective about what is truly important in life.

https://www.amazon.com/Replay-Ken-Grimwood-ebook/dp/B0F9MY5M...

FinnLobsien5• 1 year ago

One of the most impactful books of my life. I think it's so important to realize that even if you could go back and rectify your mistakes, buy Bitcoin, invest in Google, whatever, you'd eventually run into the exact problem that nothing means anything and what you actually want is some permanence.

There's a quote I love from The Remains of The Day:

I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?”

jebarker4• 1 year ago

I question whether the author's story about their mother's farm stand is really about unled lives in the past sense. They seem to be telling a cautionary tale about it but his mother was trying to change her future life in the present. I don't think that warning about dwelling on possible past lives and suggesting you shouldn't make changes in your current life are the same thing.

Probably relatedly though, I never really think about how things could have been and yet I am haunted by disatissfaction (despite having a great life) and always looking for how I'll change myself or my situation (work mostly) going forward. Maybe these are two views on the same neurosis.

999900000999• 1 year ago

Once upon a time a certain someone wanted to come over,in reality I had to decline, but in an alternate timeline she does. We have fun, she decides to keep it, but signs over custody to me. Our daughter is a musical prodigy. With her sights on Juilliard.

I can play out a similar scenario with quite a few slight variations. But this what if stuff is almost always positive.

It's never what if I never downloaded Unity and taught myself to program.

It's never, what if that eviction was a bit faster.

For most of us reading this our lives are modern miracles. I came from nothing and I've made a comfortable 6 figure salary for a decade.

Be content with where you're at, you will never have everything you want.

FinnLobsien5• 1 year ago

That's true. We always imagine if we could go back we could correct our mistakes (and usually it's about regrets of what we didn't do).

Yet if we could, we'd also make new mistakes that we'd then want to rectify by going back.

sircasss• 1 year ago

I felt a strong resonance with the line: “If I had made a different choice back then, how would things be now?” It’s a question everyone has asked themselves in some quiet moment. I remember when I was going through a tough time in my entrepreneurial journey — I felt like I couldn’t go on, crushed by the weight of it all. In those moments, I always thought: if only I had chosen differently, maybe I wouldn’t be suffering so much now. But when I got through the crisis and found some success later on, I would look back and think: I’m actually glad I made those choices. No matter how our other parallel selves might be living, there will always be some regrets. Regret is simply a part of life.

askafriend• 1 year ago

AI?

runamuck2• 1 year ago

I "died" in 2018 and it felt like waking up from a dream. This world just melted away like an amusing afterthought. That helped informed my attitude to life: enjoy it, make life enjoyable for others, spread love.

ivape• 1 year ago

Can you explain that. Was it a near fatal experience? I've heard from someone similar that once they processed nearly dying, they pretty much got all the perspective they ever needed.

runamuck2• 1 year ago

Yes - near fatal. I floated away from my body, and saw myself in 3rd person view about 100 feet up. The vision became grainy, like a VHS tape. I had the same sensation that I have when I wake up in the morning after vivid dreams, and the memories (and world/ physics) of those dreams fade away - this world faded away. I remember thinking "oh, why did I worry so much down there?" and found it funny.

stormfather• 1 year ago

Please say more

smrtinsert• 1 year ago

My mid life has been by design and its going great. My father had a lucrative career at the significant cost of family time. I'm around and engaged in being a dad and husband. I got into software because it offered great work life balance and its relatively easy and fun. That said, I'm the type of person who has a hard time not working into the early hours if I get caught in a problem. Sometimes I wonder if that's truly nature or nurture from watching my father. I take issue with companies that force that lifestyle on me though.

The other day we went for ice cream after dinner out and movie. I can't tell you fine people enough how much of an accomplishment that felt to me. It's something so simple it must seem ridiculous. I never wanted big money. The cost is simply too high.

javier_e06• 1 year ago

No, thank you. One ride on this carnival crazy-house-of-mirrors and illusions is good enough for me.

ednite• 1 year ago

Hope I’m not too off-base here, but reading this really hit home as i recently decided to make some drastic changes.

I get it, life throws different stuff at all of us. I’ve had more lemons than I ever asked for. But for me, it’s not about living in the what-ifs. It’s more about asking how can I?

Sure, we all think about starting over or going back in time. But for me, those thoughts usually fade when I ask myself: Why not now? Is it really too late?

What helped was letting go of regret.

Just my two cents: drop the what-ifs mindset. If something needs to change, don’t dwell on what could’ve been. Ask yourself: How can I make it happen now?

meany• 1 year ago

One thing I wonder is that - assuming no extreme personal calamity - I would be just as happy/sad/depressed no matter what life I had led. How much of our inner sense of well being is determined by outward life circumstances. Living in the first world and working in the tech industry, I live better than 99% of the people that ever lived, including all my ancestors. What’s really crazy is that I’m not insanely happy all the time with my incredible good fortune. It seems that no matter what I got from life - I’d calibrate back to where I am now.

ryandrake• 1 year ago

I believe that our "success trajectory" is something like 10-20% our own choices and 80-90% pedigree / where we start from. And probably some percentage of "other luck." So I don't really think too hard about doing it over because I don't feel like I've made many really bad decisions. I've gotten about as far as I could have reasonably expected, given being born to a family of school teachers living in a rural middle of nowhere, where success meant getting a decent job at the local mill. No do-over would make my father a rich, well-connected businessman. No do-over would get me into Phillips Exeter Academy as a high schooler and then Harvard or Yale. No do-over would land me in Goldman Sachs post-graduation. So I really don't dwell on what might have been.

If I could go way farther back in time and bend my entire family tree's trajectory such that I started out on 3rd base, that would be a different story.

kxter• 1 year ago

If I could do it all over again, I would say screw the startup, the money, the IPO and all that crap. I'd run away to an island and spend maximum time with my first partner - who I lost far too soon in life. No money will ever bring them back. The time lost was not worth it. It's the biggest regret in my life that can still bring me to tears as a write this. I would give up everything to go back and tell my younger self to change that one fateful decision.

kunzhi• 1 year ago

Reading the article and the comments I free-associated to Treebeard from Lord of the Rings:

"Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should have dearly liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely."

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 1 year ago

I'd not invite partner #1 to move in. I'd quit job #1 sooner. I'd try to keep job #2 going longer. I'd not take job #4 at all.

I wouldn't date partner #5. That probably says something huge.

tristor• 1 year ago

Honestly I wouldn't change much. I think I'd have kept some relationships going that I let fizzle away. I would have done more academically earlier in my life. But otherwise, I think I've made good decisions, served my family and community, and done work that I'm proud of that I feel is morally and ethically defensible. Had I done things differently, I would hope I could have done more to give back than I have done in this current life, but at the end of the day I'm pretty happy with where I'm at.

mikewarot• 1 year ago

The real question is how much of my current knowledge would I take with me? If I don't get anything, all I'd do is repeat everything again.

The next is what the restart age would be... Too young and I might get myself killed by a vengeful father.

If I could go back to somewhere around my 20th birthday, with all I know now. Technology wise, I'd do everything I could to make sure Email was autheticated, zero terminated strings were abolished and get a BitGrid chip made.

Oh... And HTML would definitely be a language for the separate addition layering of hypertext markup, instead of the crap we have now.

What if you could do it all over? (2020)

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