LogFAQs > #932566386

The one thing people never really consider when it comes to the whole idea of living your life again is that you're going to be seriously messed up for a long time.

For your first couple years you're going to have the psychological trauma of being fully self-aware but unable to move or form words properly (it's not just brain development but also physical development you'll lack). Shitting yourself, relying on adults to feed you (with no real say in the matter), spending most of your time just staring at walls until they start letting you watch TV (though even then you won't have a say in what to watch, and a lot of it will suck for a long time). And you'll have to spend most of your time knowing about major events in advance yet never admitting to that, or otherwise your parents will start thinking you're possessed or something (which you technically would be).

Once you get to school, the other kids are going to find you incredibly creepy - you'll basically be an adult in a child body. You'll never connect with anyone the way you (hopefully) did in real life, because you won't relate to any of them and they'll be weirded out by you. You're going to have a full decade of having no friends, of having teachers who feel uneasy around you, and relearning material you already know (you can potentially benefit here by being a Doogie Houser-type kid and leapfrog grades and graduate years earlier, but there's a limit to how much you can get away with - no one is going to let you go to college at age 8 even if you seem to know all the material).

Once you get to actual adulthood, things will level out - you can always move to some place you've never been before, and interact with people who never knew you as a kid (and you don't have prior life memories of that will constantly get in the way and make you seem like a creepy stalker). To entirely new people, you'll seem like a relatively normal adult (unless you've been super-traumatized by the last 20 years and it blatantly shows). But that also means giving up every friend you currently have in life, no matter how much you like them (it also means all of your foreknowledge won't be all that useful when it comes to your personal life, just financially).

Also, you'll still have to be very careful about hiding the fact that you know things in advance. Go around warning people about 9/11 before it happens and you're likely to get arrested for being involved.

The other problem people don't consider is that they blithely accept the idea that "Welp, guess I'll be gay then", but that's also going to radically impact your potential dating situation (if you think you had trouble getting dates in your normal life, imagine what it will be like when your pool of potential partners is 1/4th to 1/10th the size and most of them feel the need to hide their preferences to some degree), and if you're old enough, it's going to have you "growing up" in a time when the social stigma for being gay is still fairly strong (my slightly older cousin who grew up in the 70s/80s didn't feel comfortable coming out until he was nearly 30 - even when he was living with his boyfriend they'd pass it off as them just being "friends", even though most people knew full well what the situation was). Of course, if you're full-bi you could probably get away with it a bit easier, or if you're gay now it would potentially be a plus (the same for people who are trans or at least aspire to be to some degree).



xjayguyx posted...

Yup I'll be one ultra rich lesbian :)

Not necessarily. While you think you'll be able to bet, invest, or invent your way to success, keep in mind that the average person doesn't remember the exact results of all THAT many sporting events (and will look suspicious if they start to constantly win anyway). And that, while it's easy to say "I'm going to invent Google" (or Facebook, or the iPhone, or whatever), it's a lot harder to actually do, and do in a way that will be as successful as it was naturally.

Sure, you could potentially profit if you're very clever and very careful, but not necessarily so much so that you'll be top of Forbes 500. And that's before you even start to get into things like systemic discrimination in most of the business world that will restrict you to some degree. Or the fact that you'll have to spend the first 15 years or so of life reliving your childhood, and better hope you don't start forgetting important names and dates if you're planning to exploit gambling or investing.

(And let's not even get into the potential problems you're going to face if we live in a Butterfly Effect chaotic universe, where the moment you start doing things differently in your life it immediately beings rippling outwards and radically changing history in major and unpredictable ways, so by the time you're a teenager everything's pretty much happening differently anyway. If that's the case, this whole scenario is kind of screwed.)

That being said, if whoever is offering you this deal gives you time to make preparations, then you could really beat the system. Do a little research, go back and find a huge lotto/Powerball payout and memorize the numbers (though again, hope you remember every number even after 15 years or so of childhood).
---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family