The appeal of time travel
- by Pixel
Would you go and relive your youth if it wasn’t really going back in time?
I realized, after writing my last post, that I never wanted to go back to that time in my life again! But if someone offered me a chance to do it, I’d do it in a heart beat. Why the disjunct? Simple, I wanted to change some things about the past (not major things, but I would still want to).
In other words. It’s all fine and dandy to say you’d do things differently, but what if you went back to the same age range in a different set of circumstances? Would you do it? Would you start over right now at any particular age?
I wouldn’t. Sure, I’d be able to wipe the floor with all the other kids mentally and have them respect me. And I’d know just what to say and how to say it to woo every girl I liked, and get great grades and know what I wanted to do, but I just don’t care about that anymore. The fun was in doing it without cheating.
The sole appeal of the thought experiment is to change things in my past to appease my psychological guilt or stroke my psychological ego. Without that, to have to do it all over again, no matter how much better it would be, does not appeal to me in the slightest. How about you?
Screw that, what if they were the same circumstances, just that everyone had forgotten the previous past.
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Would you go and relive your youth if it wasn’t really going back in time? I realized, after writing my last post, that I never wanted to go back to that time in my life again! But if someone offered me a chance to do it, I’d do it in a heart beat. Why the…
I like the last line of this note… that’s trippy.
To answer the question, no; I’d have no desire to go back and do it all over again, even with the knowledge I have today, because the knowledge I have today grew from what I was and what I went through back then. I’m pretty proud of what I’ve become, so although I might have learned things the hard way back then, they were lessons I had to go through – without “cheating,” as you say.
The question I have is what if I didn’t go through the things I went through back then? What would I end up becoming, armed with all the intelligence in the world to prevent hurt and growing pains from happening? Maybe I’d be even more of an outcast, ‘cos I’d be frightfully intelligent and knowledgeable for my age, and the pain of feeling alone would be that much more painful. Who knows.
Going back in time has never appealed to me either. If I went back as me, the way I am now, I would be bored out of my mind and driven crazy with the childishness of it all, and if I went back as the person I was at that particular age, I have no doubt that I’d let everything happen just as it did in the first place. What would be the point?
Sure I have some really great memories from my childhood, but I wouldn’t give the growing up part away for anything. I feel that way to such an extent that I wouldn’t even go back to last weekend, much less ten years ago.
Would I change anything about my awkward, nerdy, self-conscious younger self? Heck no! Everything I went through in my life taught me a valuable lesson. I wouldn’t be the amazing, witty, pompous windbag I am today if I didn’t have anything to overcome. And I am awesome. No bones about it.
I’m obsessive and I have to slap my hands from editing everything to death, so if someone offered me a chance to change something, the temptation may be too great to resist.
With my luck though, the unknown consequences of fucking with time and space would scare me too much to do anything great with it, and I’d be trapped in my 11 year old body reliving the horror of adolescence all over again.