11–20 of 139 posts
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.
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 kno…
It'd just be the same game in a different environment, with an inventory of items from a different tech tree.
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"
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd just be the same game in a different environment, with an inventory of items from a different tech tree.
Do you think someone from 1025 would feel this way if they came here? Serious question.
People are happy in Africa, Latin America and the poor parts of Asia now, many places people are happier than in the US actually.
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.
I'd probably join Slack early, successfully rail against Electron and kill the whole company.
You monster
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.
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. Th…
The movie Groundhog Day comes to mind.
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.
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.