If You Could Go Back To Your Youth With Current Knowledge What Would You Do?

[Spacescifi]

In my case wow.... I would get a major jump start to my life.... with a chance of me getting into trouble as well.... purely from taking the road not traveled rather than playing it safe which is what I did IRL. Or I may just jump start my life and get out ASAP.... since I would know enough that I did not know then.

 

I think arguably the hardest things will be less independence early on and a lack of the technology that nowadays is a staple that was not always around im my youth.

[Nuke]

does this involve time travel or am i just suddenly young again? if so id probibly jump on the crypto bandwagon 10 years sooner and buy stock in google. of course im a lot more jaded now than i was back then, so i dont know if it would be much of an improvement. 

[Spacescifi]

21 minutes ago, Nuke said:

does this involve time travel or am i just suddenly young again? if so id probibly jump on the crypto bandwagon 10 years sooner and buy stock in google. of course im a lot more jaded now than i was back then, so i dont know if it would be much of an improvement. 

Literally time travel but you are young you again.

Guess you think you nay get into trouble sooner?

I myself would be incline to pursue some interests of mine that I would make time for, while avoiding and ending toxic relationships early on in the family.

Would have been drama sure, but I would have been out on my own sooner than later.... minus any naive thoughts that things might improve with them.

[kerbiloid]

Would be having a rest in class and scare adults.

Would let others write off my workbooks from the beginning, not just from the fifth year, as it costs nothing for me, but the adults lied when were saying that it's bad.

Would have no male schoolfriends to calmly visit the class reunions without too much loud and pushy friendshipness there, and because their childish games would look stupid for wise me.

Would troll teachers in more sly ways and provoke girls (and the teacheress of English) more often.

Would have only two occupations: studying the university program in my 12 to save time later and athletics. Because no computers, no interesting movies, no music I like, what else should I do?

Would study on the neighboring faculty where I mostly was spending time amd know which neighboring company join.

(The question is actually what I was thinking about before this year. Actually, I have a whole plan for this case.)

Edited February 17, 2022 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

_(multipost)

Edited February 17, 2022 by kerbiloid

[AlamoVampire]

In all honesty, I have plenty of things I would LOVE a second chance at. But, I would pass at the chance to revisit any of those moments. Every moment in my life has woven the tapestry that makes me who I am right now. Pulling even one thread of my past would unravel that tapestry. To get a better visual of what I mean watch Star Trek the Next Generation episode Tapestry. Picard gets a phaser blast to his chest, Q playing god gives Picard the same chance posited in the OP. 
 

033002172022

[Superfluous J]

Just now, AlamoVampire said:

In all honesty, I have plenty of things I would LOVE a second chance at. But, I would pass at the chance to revisit any of those moments. Every moment in my life has woven the tapestry that makes me who I am right now. Pulling even one thread of my past would unravel that tapestry.

Basically, this. However, assuming we're not talking "I'd buy stock in Microsoft the day it was offered" kind of things and actual general advice, I'd love to have entered college with ANY idea at all what life was like after college. Maybe I'd not have floundered for 3 years and dropped out. Then again, if it wasn't for that I might not be able to say I've worked happily at the same company for almost 30 years since.

[Nuke]

3 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

In all honesty, I have plenty of things I would LOVE a second chance at. But, I would pass at the chance to revisit any of those moments. Every moment in my life has woven the tapestry that makes me who I am right now. Pulling even one thread of my past would unravel that tapestry. To get a better visual of what I mean watch Star Trek the Next Generation episode Tapestry. Picard gets a phaser blast to his chest, Q playing god gives Picard the same chance posited in the OP. 
 

033002172022

id hate to wake up a blueshirt. 

[Nuke]

3 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

Basically, this. However, assuming we're not talking "I'd buy stock in Microsoft the day it was offered" kind of things and actual general advice, I'd love to have entered college with ANY idea at all what life was like after college. Maybe I'd not have floundered for 3 years and dropped out. Then again, if it wasn't for that I might not be able to say I've worked happily at the same company for almost 30 years since.

i think id have skipped college entirely if were being honest. it contributed jack beans to any personal success on my part. maybe going to a less scammy college and taking a major not subject to tech rot. an it degree from 2002 isnt worth much these days. 

[TheSaint]

2 hours ago, Nuke said:

i think id have skipped college entirely if were being honest. it contributed jack beans to any personal success on my part. maybe going to a less scammy college and taking a major not subject to tech rot. an it degree from 2002 isnt worth much these days. 

And, see, I think exactly the opposite. When I was in high school I applied to a bunch of top-brand colleges. I was accepted to Cal Tech, Embry-Riddle, Rose-Hulman, made it to interviews for MIT. But I had been banking on paying for it with a ROTC scholarship, which I didn't get because I failed the physical (bad eyesight). I had no plan B. So I got all butthurt, tossed it all in the can and went and joined the Navy as an enlisted. If I had just gotten over myself, gone to a Cal State college and paid for it by working a crappy fast food job like most of my friends did, I would have graduated in 91 or 92 with an electrical engineering (my original plan) or computer science (what I eventually wound up with) degree. What was everyone with those degrees in California doing in the early 90s? They were getting snapped up by Intel, Cisco, HP, etc. They were getting paid half-salary, half-stock to work in startups. I could be a retired dot-com millionaire at this point.

But, as as has been pointed out above, then I wouldn't have lived The Odyssey. I wouldn't own a pair of shoes that have waded in every ocean and sea on the planet. I wouldn't have met my wife. I wouldn't have the three nerdiest kids on the planet. No, I think I'll stick with what I have, warts and all.

I think if I had any advice to give my 18-year-old self it would be to change me. Work on that temper, it's never going to help you. Be patient, with yourself and with everyone else. Stop gazing at your navel and pay attention to the people around you, they're what's really important. I think advice like that would have changed my life for the better at 18 way more than a college degree or a million bucks.

Edited February 17, 2022 by TheSaint

[Piatzin]

Ah, the sweet, glorious, gold-tinted days of when I was....uh, twelve. No, ten – I'm barely twenty now, youth would be ten, surely. Half and half.

Gosh I'm so old. What did I do when I was ten? Um....Played with LEGO. Didn't have a computer. Ran around with sticks. Ate ludicrous volumes of junk food in summer days without getting fat. So much time. Such memories. I was still in Montessori and had barely met current lifelong friends.

I'd ignore school for the first few years and learn German or French or both. I'd stick a toe in Chinese, maybe Russian. I'd run thought experiments on my new age cohort and sit enraptured and fascinated by the responses of the ten-year old mind.

Gee, ten, I can't imagine being ten.

Honestly I'd probably just run around and be ten.

At some point I'd hijack my dad's computer and get him to buy buy buy bitcoin (was it still low back then?) but not much else.

[benzman]

I would learn everything I could about women and make them my main interest.  I am sure I would never regret it!

[Piatzin]

Just now, benzman said:

I would learn everything I could about women and make them my main interest.  I am sure I would never regret it!

What the heck are you talking about women are super easy. All you gotta do is treat them like normal people and everyone's happy it's great.

[Nuke]

7 hours ago, TheSaint said:

And, see, I think exactly the opposite. When I was in high school I applied to a bunch of top-brand colleges. I was accepted to Cal Tech, Embry-Riddle, Rose-Hulman, made it to interviews for MIT. But I had been banking on paying for it with a ROTC scholarship, which I didn't get because I failed the physical (bad eyesight). I had no plan B. So I got all butthurt, tossed it all in the can and went and joined the Navy as an enlisted. If I had just gotten over myself, gone to a Cal State college and paid for it by working a crappy fast food job like most of my friends did, I would have graduated in 91 or 92 with an electrical engineering (my original plan) or computer science (what I eventually wound up with) degree. What was everyone with those degrees in California doing in the early 90s? They were getting snapped up by Intel, Cisco, HP, etc. They were getting paid half-salary, half-stock to work in startups. I could be a retired dot-com millionaire at this point.

But, as as has been pointed out above, then I wouldn't have lived The Odyssey. I wouldn't own a pair of shoes that have waded in every ocean and sea on the planet. I wouldn't have met my wife. I wouldn't have the three nerdiest kids on the planet. No, I think I'll stick with what I have, warts and all.

I think if I had any advice to give my 18-year-old self it would be to change me. Work on that temper, it's never going to help you. Be patient, with yourself and with everyone else. Stop gazing at your navel and pay attention to the people around you, they're what's really important. I think advice like that would have changed my life for the better at 18 way more than a college degree or a million bucks.

well when i say i wouldn't have gone to college i think id have adopted a trade instead. tradesmen make tons of money. welder or machinist. growing up nobody ever told be jobs like those exist, 'thats a blue collar job, you dont want that! you will die poor if you do that.' i think student adviser people get kickbacks from the universities to say stuff like that. a big name university was never an option for me and i ended up in a hole in the wall tech school. i wanted something better but had no support from my family. 

i could have gotten that tradesmen education in the military.  had i attempted to join the usmc after high school instead of after college, i probibly wouldn't have come up 4-f. my family was trying to get me on disability on bogus childhood disorders, so i had a lot of crap on my medical records that the marines didnt like. but i was already busted by that time, id have to go back to my terrible twos to stand a chance at a proper reset. the only thing of value in my life is any knowledge ive obtained, and in this scenario i get to keep that. the rest can burn. 

3 hours ago, benzman said:

I would learn everything I could about women and make them my main interest.  I am sure I would never regret it!

you would definitely regret it. 

3 hours ago, Earthlinger said:

What the heck are you talking about women are super easy. All you gotta do is treat them like normal people and everyone's happy it's great.

while that tends to work better than any conceivable alternative. throw in the towel about trying to understand them, nobody with manparts ever will. 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Nuke

[TheSaint]

2 minutes ago, Nuke said:

well when i say i wouldn't have gone to college i think id have adopted a trade instead. tradesmen make tons of money. welder or machinist. growing up nobody ever told be jobs like those exist, 'thats a blue collar job, you dont want that! you will die poor if you do that.' i think student adviser people get kickbacks from the universities to say stuff like that. a big name university was never an option for me and i ended up in a hole in the wall tech school. i wanted something better but had no support from my family. 

This is totally true. When I was graduating nobody even talked about skilled trades. It was college or nothing. I picked (what I perceived as) nothing. Because I was ornery that way.

2 minutes ago, Nuke said:

i could have gotten that tradesmen education in the military.  had i attempted to join the usmc after high school instead of after college, i probibly wouldn't have come up 4-f. my family was trying to get me on disability on bogus childhood disorders, so i had a lot of crap on my medical records that the marines didnt like. but i was already busted by that time, id have to go back to my terrible twos to stand a chance at a proper reset. the only thing of value in my life is any knowledge ive obtained, and in this scenario i get to keep that. the rest can burn. 

Yeah, that kinda blows. My dad and mom never put any pressure on my brother and I to do anything, they were all, "We just want you to have a career and be happy." But, TBH, now I kinda wish they had put some pressure on us, at least a little bit. But, you know, Dad had a second-grade education, his idea of a great career was not digging ditches.  Mom had a high-school diploma, but she had her own issues she was dealing with, still is. I think they did the best they could, but I don't think either of them were really equipped to deal with two unruly teenage boys with high IQs and sour attitudes. I just wonder sometimes if maybe with a little more discipline and direction we might have wound up with our name on something, you know what I mean? Oh well. <shrug>

[Just Jim]

I would do absolutely nothing. I would only make things worse.
Trust me, I've seen way too many sci-fi movies on this subject and they all end badly... lol

[MKI]

I'm on the fence if my life would actually be an improvement.

I have basically no regrets, and knowing how things turn out might actually screw things up.

Easy things would be to invest into specific companies when they are just starting out,  looking to take advantage of big events, and avoiding a few choices that turned out bad. 

But beyond that I'm sure I'd do different stuff for the sake of it, but generally the overall choices I make would be essentially the same.

[benzman]

7 hours ago, Earthlinger said:

What the heck are you talking about women are super easy. All you gotta do is treat them like normal people and everyone's happy it's great.

Nevertheless, I stand by my original post.  And now we had better terminate this exchange before the moderators do it for us.

[Jacke]

If I could go back to my youth with my current knowledge....  Do some things much the same, do others differently or not at all.  And make a killing on the stock market.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Jacke

[kerbiloid]

Here is a constraint I've come to, to make the given less cheating.

The target "past world" exists as your internal representation of its details.

As the "future-in-the-past you" is not exactly "past you", we should assume that there is some level of uncertainty, depending on the subjective significancy of a value or a an event.

You aren't able and don't need to remember all details of the target reality, you want it in whole.
The insignificant details are insignificant for you, you don't remember them, and would accept any their version. 

So, the constructed "past" reality is like a picture sharp in the middle and blurry at the edge of your attention.

This means that there are background events which stay uncertain and get implemented randomly.

This in turn means that unless you already have won a lottery and clearly remember the ticket number, and can't recall which one you had taken from the drum, you can't rewin it in the past, as it's not in the focus of your attention, it's a background event.
The same with horse races, financial market, etc. Unless there was a certain event engraved in your memory as your life beacon, you can't learn by heart a list of lottery rounds or currency rates, and use it in the "future-in-the-past". The results of the lottery, the rate history, etc. will be random.

Though, some global events stay solid, as they mark the timescale of your internal "Me".
So, probably you can bet on some events like Challenger disaster or 9/11 (and immediately get listed, lol).

***

Also, as the "future-in-the-past you" is a next recursive iteration of the "past you", and your current personality is formed by the already happened events, the reality would try to oppose your attempts to change it in a cheating manner.
Say, if your sibling's spouse annoys you, and you have prevented their marriage, the sibling will marry to another person, but most probably a similar one.

So, you can mostly change you own way, rather than affect other familiar actors,

***

Another constraint.

As you "can" repeat the recursive trick again, the third "jump" may cross the "second" jump path, as you already have two past realities in your memory (from the first and from the second "jumps").
The event may/should get unpredictable.

Based on that, you can repeat your jumps "endlessly", but the entry point of the every next jump should be later than the previous one.
So, the sequence of your entry points should be shifting in chronological order.

So, you can't jump to your 12, then to your 5.
Once you have enetered your 12, the next jump may begin only in 12.00001.
So, choose your very first entry point wisely.

[Nuke]

so what you are saying is that rather than young you's mind being flat out replaced for a copy of old you's mind, they would still be young you with only your present knowledge but not your memories. you might whip out calculus to solve a problem in gradeschool math class and not have a clue how you knew how to do that. or perhaps any memory of the future you have would be vague, and subject to interpretation by young you. even if you have prophetic visions of the future, you do not have the ability to discern them from your own imagination. you have a premonition about 9/11 for example. how do you know that's going to happen and that your mind just didnt pull elements from various tom clancy movie adaptations? and would know it well enough to be able to stop it? you might have a weird feeling when you see google come out of the woodwork, but would you buy stock because of that or would you have written it off as deja vu and missed the boat completely?

[kerbiloid]

24 minutes ago, Nuke said:

so what you are saying is that rather than young you's mind being flat out replaced for a copy of old you's mind

In my own thoughts on this topic some time ago, I was first thinking what the current me can teach the younger past-me.

Skipping several logical iterations, finally I had come to the scheme when the current-me contacts the past-me, and both personalities get merged.
(In my case it would be easy, as the current-me is mostly a better informed and experienced past-me with useful post-knowledge.
So, the young past-me would just feel that he has just loaded a HDD copy of intenet, if that me could know what's the "HDD" and "internet", as it's 70s-80s.)

So, then I just was following the "my totally current personality inside my that  body learning at school and then in the university" scheme,
The post-knowledge (i.e. memories) stays with me (otherwise I would just be repeating same decisions and sometimes mistakes), so watching in 1985 the launch of Columbia, I'm aware of the 1986 Challenger, at it happens in its time.
But I can't just recall lottery tickets, footbal matches, or so, because they are blurry background events for me, implemented randomly.
Also I can't remember exact dates when I, say, caught a hit in face because was walking that exact route at that exact moment, not five minutes sooner or lateer. I just don't remember the date, so I can't choose another time or route at that exact date. (Though, I can unintentionally do this by random, so occasionally pass that street not simultaneously with that bad people, walking there at that exact time).

24 minutes ago, Nuke said:

even if you have prophetic visions of the future, you do not have the ability to discern them from your own imagination. you have a premonition about 9/11 for example. how do you know that's going to happen

I just remember this. I'm aware that I'm surfing that reality not first time.

24 minutes ago, Nuke said:

and would know it well enough to be able to stop it?

Go and tell about? No, thanks. Nobody would believe before, but everyone would accuse after. So, it would save nobody, but just increment the casulaties counter by one.

Actually, that's the strongest reason to avoid showing off with the post-knowledge in that second-hand reality. 

24 minutes ago, Nuke said:

you might have a weird feeling when you see google come out of the woodwork, but would you buy stock because of that or would you have written it off as deja vu and missed the boat completely?

Just technically I'm so far from buying google stock in the late USSR, that my ideas were limited with companies known to me, and how would I optimize my career and so.

Edited February 18, 2022 by kerbiloid

[StrandedonEarth]

Buy and sell shares in IBM, Apple, and Tesla at the right times. And bitcoin.

I wasted time trying to figure out what branch of computers to learn and wound up doing nothing. In hindsight I’d have gone for CAD/CAM and CNC machining