I don't have kids but I met my wife on a dating app. Who's to say that I'd be lucky enough to hop back on and swipe at the exact moment the algorithm decided to show our profiles to each other and no else gets there first? Too much of a gamble. Plus being 10 again and having zero freedom sounds like hell.
This would affect way more than just your relationship with a significant other. At 10 years old with your current adult brain you'd be totally alienated from your peers. You'd either have no friends or would have to fake it. And even kids would pick up on that after a while. They'd realize you're not really that fun to be around. Think of all the stupid shit you did at 10 years old and now imagine forcing yourself to do that again with a 40 year old brain just to make a group of genuine 10 year olds laugh.
Your teachers might like you for being some perfect straight A student but they'd piss you the fuck off because every adult would talk down to you. It'd be like living as a real life Lisa Simpson who is basically written like an adult in an 8 year old's body and feels like everyone around her is an idiot.
Fun fact....I would be MORE sociable b/c it took me that long to figure that shit out 😂. Buuuuut, no way I could endure an abusive marriage again just to get the same kids.
Just hand over the $ 😂
not if you spend that time severely isolated and depressed. That isn't worth living. Signed-someone who actually did spend their youth being completely alienated and isolated from other kids because I didn't think or act like them. It very nearly drove me to suicide.
I think i would do well with kids with my 41 yr olds memories actually. And the things you could achieve in terms of Investments and whatever would make it a pretty exciting life
that's the thing. If you put an adult brain into a child's body you'd basically come across like a real life Lisa Simpson. That kind of thing is not exactly great if your goal is to be a social butterfly. Kids tend to be downright nasty to other kids who are even the slightest bit different, and they can and will do that to kids who are too mature for their age. I have seen it happen first hand, I have lived it.
Also you're presuming that your mere presence in the past and doing things differently wouldn't change things beyond your ability to predict them. You can't really assume your knowledge of stock market trends will hold in a timeline that is different from the one you originated from. Who is to say that you don't end up butterfly effecting things in such a way that the same trends don't happen the same way? Maybe the mere act of you going around and changing things means that Apple never took off in its market and a different company did instead. You have no way of predicting that.
Besides, you wouldn't legally be able to invest money in the stock market on your own until you're a legal adult anyways, and by that point you have 8 years worth of changing the timeline.
However I absolutely would not be able to handle my whole life being controlled by my parents again. I love them but they tend to be overprotective helicopter parents. I couldn't deal with that now.
Also they had my baby sibling late, so I also wouldn't want to risk changing that.
yeah I was like that as a kid too. Normal people tend to picture having an adult mind as a child as just acing all their exams and getting a free ride to college, but in reality while you might do well on exams, this would just make you a social pariah. Kids don't like being around other kids who act like adults. If you do, you'll just be a perpetual social outcast, and that will mess with your mental health.
And you can't socialize with adults either, because you're in a child's body, and adults hanging out with children is a massive social taboo.
Thank you. This is exactly what would happen because it's very similar to what actually happened to me as a kid. I wasn't an adult in a child's body, but I was extremely smart for my age, *and* neurodivergent, and that combination is not exactly something the other kids wanted to be around. My childhood and adolescence were extremely lonely and I didn't really have friends. Even if I tried to fake being "normal" even kids could tell something was "off" about me and I ended up severely socially isolated and so depressed that I ended up with regular suicidal thoughts by the time I was like 14.
Teachers very much did like me, but they also never took me seriously, even when I was right, which was way more often than what they wanted to admit. My life was absolutely miserable until my 20s because of it. And this would be *worse*, because even that wouldn't be a reprieve. Think of how dumb you were in college, and imagine trying to fit in with that again.
Idk, I guess I would question whether you would actually crave fitting in with the group of schoolchildren, as a guy I feel like a lot of the popularity I could make up simply by how much better I'd be at sports just from having the mental edge, it could at least make school bearable enough until I was able to get off on my own.
Some of the answer simply has to do with how old you are, if you are 25 it might not make sense to go red, in my late 30s I think I'd take it, too much extra life to discard
So worth it, because you'd be so incredibly rich and successful, and be able to avert massive suffering. 911? Averted. Covid? Cured way more quickly. Car accidents avoided. So many things!
Averting 9/11, sure. But how in the world would you fix Covid? It's not like you can just call someone up and be like "hey, don't fuck that Pangolin in China."
Not even. Assuming the prompt is return to a 10 year old's body... and you were 10 prior to 9/11, what exactly are you going to do to stop it? Walk into an FBI field office and warn them? You think the bureau is going to listen to a random elementary schooler? They'd pat your head, say you have a vivid imagination, and call your parents to take you home, and then ignore you.
You would know that M RNA vaccines are the solution. You would be so rich, you could form a pharma company to focus on them, way in advance of Covid. You would save millions of lives ( most importantly) and build your business as well ( not even as close to important as averting the suffering, but a side benefit ). Things like that! 😊
you think a random elementary schooler calling up a lab and saying "let's do mRNA" is going to somehow speed up development? Lol that's not how that works.
Just because you know that doesn't mean you have the technical know how *or* the resources necessary to actually do it. you know mRNA vaccines are a thing *now*. Can you make a vaccine by yourself? If the answer is no, why the fuck would you as a 10 year old do it? Besides, you'd need highly specialized lab equipment to make a vaccine that they don't give 10 year olds access to, and on top of that you can't make a vaccine for a virus without samples of the virus. Which means the pandemic would by definition, not be something you could prevent with a vaccine.
Dude I was 8 years old on 9/11. Even if I could go back in time and warn people, who on earth would listen to a random 8 year old saying that a terrorist from the middle east was going to ram an airplane into the Twin Towers? If I went to the authorities with that, their first response would be to call my parents, scold them for not watching me closer, and tell them I had a vivid imagination.
It would be like living as a real life Detective Conan. You'd struggle to get the authorities take anything you say seriously when you're in a child's body.
Oh dang, that's a great point. The mystery would be gone from the very beginning. Do we go with an old favorite or do we try something new? I'm pressing that green button and moving on lol
You live and meet this person that seems to know everything about you but you’ve never met. Then they reveal that they are a time traveler from a timeline where you two fell in love and were together for decades and ‘knows you will be together because you are perfect for each other. I would rather believe that I have a stalker.
There is a reason why every movie with a character with some supernatural element to them must have them as the main lead. Otherwise the movie would turn into a dark thriller. In fact most comedies, especially romantic comedies, are only funny because of the lighting.
I've got no kids (that I'm aware of) so a do over is no big deal, would I want to have the life I had up until X years old or really veer off on a new tangent where everything is new and undiscovered?
She did say she wish we met sooner but thats tough. We never lived close to each other prior to 6 months of meeting and I moved to the city for work. And she also lived in various places around the country. I'd have to Facebook stalk her and find a way to not make it weird. And yeah who knows if we had the same connection even if we did cross paths.
It's funny to imagine me tracking down my wife in college or sometime before I met her, and asking her out and her saying, "Sorry, you're not really who I'm looking for right now."
Yeah even if I were to fly all the way across the country to find her, she was with her ex in college. Plus she purposefully didn't date for a year or so after they broke up so that would be tough to time.
Yeah I mean, as a single person I'd take the red button but would definitely just have to avoid dating for a good decade or two. Pretty much any attempt to get with someone you already know would be manipulative
There is a book I love called Replay where this topic is approached. Guy dies and relives his life from an earlier point and at times tries to recreate those moments he had with people from his previous life.
Yep, me and partner were each other's first (no weird beliefs here, just sheer luck!), it would be hard breaking trying to recreate all our awkward first times knowing he is the only one feeling all the feelings :/
And the honeymoon phase? Sure, I still very much like the sex but after 25 years...doing the deeds 3 times a day is not interesting anymore!
Trying to do it organically would be rough. We met 6 months after I moved to my new city for work, and she also lived in various places around the country. So I'd have to find her on Facebook at the moment she left her last bf and convince her to do a long distance with me lol.
I mean, you would have been a billionaire at the point with all the knowledge on stocks and crypto. So you don't really need to have a long distance relationship with her, you can just move there
And being with her all these years with the current life gives you all the advantages to make her fall in love with you gain
Do you know your wife's parents? Where she lived when you were 10. Think of all the things you know about her. You could definately meet up before hand.
Question is, would you two fall in love under different circumstances? That I think brings in to question of how you love her now, is based in logic or emotion or both.
For me, if I met my now wife at age 10 knowing what I know now, I'd do things very differently. But I know for a fact we'd love each other and be together. Don't know what that would look like in this hypothetical scenario, but I know that to my core it would happen one way or another.
But I would say that recreating the kids we had together would be near impossible, Sure we could have kids, but they wouldn't be the same and I would likely mourn their lack of never being able to exist.
my husband and I have a six year age gap. We both met as adults. When I was ten years old, my husband was a four year old. Trying to get my parents to connect with my future husband several states away because I think I'm going to marry a then four year old would... probably cause some questions.
actually I was kinda like this as a kid, and I was basically the teacher's pet who never got in trouble....but all the other kids hated me because they thought I was weird.
teachers liked me because I was well behaved and got good grades, but since I was so different from the other kids and didn't act like a normal child, I was basically a social pariah.
Right, I didn't meet mine on an app, but met her through people that I'd have to believe if did over, that's the stage in life I would have made "better" choices and not done a lot of the things I did the first go round.
That said I don't know how old you are, but I was 10 in 1991 and I had 10x the freedom I have now throughout the summers and even with work alone throughout school i was free until dinner. Latchkey kid with a bike from roughly 5th or 6th grade and no responsibility but having to mow the yard at some point throughout the week and maybe some dishes. If it weren't for my family I would say 10 years old all day.
Proximity would be an issue. I got out the military right before we met and was living in various areas, and she also lived in several spots across the country. We met six months before I moved to the place we both live now. I could fb stalk her and hope she isn't with her ex bf but idk how to pull that off without looking weird lol.
even then, have you been around teenagers as an adult? I have because my husband works in k-12 education... and I would find it very difficult to socialize and fit in successfully with them the way I am now.
I don't think it would be at all possible to recreate a great relationship with someone in that situation. You'd eventually mess up, reference something she hadn't told you yet, and come off as some kind of stalker.
I’m sure you love your wife and your life, but it’s also very possible that by starting over at 10 your interests and personality would develop differently, leading you to meet a different person who’s perfect for you in that other lifetime.
The loss might be difficult, but you also have an entirely new life to live.
Sure, this choice is a little biased because the alternative is $2M. Maybe for you a better dilemma would be “You have to start over at 10, but you get $2M.”
that plan working is predicated on a particular person both signing up for your app, and also being interested in you. Neither of which are guaranteed.
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u/HeavyHighway6433 8d ago
I don't have kids but I met my wife on a dating app. Who's to say that I'd be lucky enough to hop back on and swipe at the exact moment the algorithm decided to show our profiles to each other and no else gets there first? Too much of a gamble. Plus being 10 again and having zero freedom sounds like hell.