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What If You Could Do It All Over?

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Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#291

Post by Machado117 »

hn_99 wrote: post #254
Waterluvian wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my nerding. This week I've been playing dark souls. I couldn't commit to a plan this time around and so now I'm part mage, part rogue, part knight, and I can't use any of the good weapons and I have like five weapons all partly upgraded. My figs all rotted and my character is just so mediocre.

It's definitely easier to commit to one path. I've played bloodborne and DS3 twice and dark souls remastered once. I completed all my playthroughs with a quality melee build. Despite these 5 playthroughs, my understanding of the game is quite narrow. I have no idea what playing as a sorcerer, pyromancer etc would be like, so at least you get that.

Playing as a sorcerer is like an hidden easy mode. You can just hurl spells at enemies from a safe distance.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#292

Post by shortandsweet »

teekert wrote: post #284
acwan93 wrote: post #8

This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”: > "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,…

What I don't like about this quote is that it pretends you just have to choose between all these attractive and worthwhile goals and that the choosing is the difficult part. In reality though you may opt for a career, leave the family but fail. Or you may put your career on a lower pitch only to have your wife and you decide it won't really work out. In reality, it's more like you start to climb for a fat purple fig…

Why do you assume it's not your fault?

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#293

Post by shortandsweet »

victorronin wrote: post #227

This is a fascinating subject. It looks like many people are commenting about alternative realities and that exploring them is a fool's game (BTW. I concur with that). The thing which bothers me is upbeat comments about living here and now and planting the seeds for future changes. It feels like current problems (and desire to wish them away via woulda/counda/shoulda) didn't happen entirely randomly. These problems a…

You're almost there. You're on the cusp. If you're really drawn to something you'll sacrifice everything before 9pm to make that thing happen. It might not work, it might not be a good idea from other perspectives, but if your desire drives you to what you think the world needs, you'll make time anyway possible.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#294

Post by yason »

If you really could go back and choose differently the first thing that would happen is you would eventually become lazy. You wouldn't have to think too deeply or listen to your guts in making your choices because you could effectively just undo and retry.

Your life would basically revert to depth-first search instead of carving out your own, unique path in life. This would also mean it would be much, much easier to be unhappy because you could just switch to another branch and see if the grass is greened on the other side instead of having to learn to see the green you have now.

The inability to redo choices is like death: without death, life itself would be dead. It could not pressure you to make choices, to overcome yourself, dare to go for the love of your life or that enormously ambitious career, and eventually navigate yourself into a life where you grow to be happy with what you have instead of what you want. Without the clock ticking you wouldn't make the best of you in life. Similarly, if you could backtrack to your old choices you wouldn't be compelled to learn from them and they would be rendered worthless.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#295

Post by missedthecue »

Bakary wrote: post #165
war1025 wrote: post #148

My dad got brain cancer when I was 25. That event accelerated our decision to have kids, and as a result our first daughter was born a few days after I turned 27. The reasoning I came to is that given the probabilities of how children are conceived, if my dad didn't have cancer, our first child would have been someone else than our daughter. So basically wishing anything different for my dad would be wishing that my…

At the risk of sounding vulgar, moving your hips at a slightly different rhythm or conceiving half a second later or any number of completely minute changes to the timeline would also have resulted in a completely different child. This reminds of the moment when Emil Cioran's mother mentioned how she should have aborted him outright. This led him to the insight that his life was largely an accident contingent on smal…

"any number of completely minute changes to the timeline would also have resulted in a completely different child."

Can you prove this?

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#296

Post by selestify »

shortandsweet wrote: post #292
teekert wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't like about this quote is that it pretends you just have to choose between all these attractive and worthwhile goals and that the choosing is the difficult part. In reality though you may opt for a career, leave the family but fail. Or you may put your career on a lower pitch only to have your wife and you decide it won't really work out. In reality, it's more like you start to climb for a fat purple fig…

Why do you assume it's not your fault?

Depends on your perspective, obviously. But personally I'd say we're much more a victim of circumstance than the other way around, and all success or failure is only very partially dependent on the choices we made.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#298

Post by grenoire »

yason wrote: post #294

If you really could go back and choose differently the first thing that would happen is you would eventually become lazy. You wouldn't have to think too deeply or listen to your guts in making your choices because you could effectively just undo and retry. Your life would basically revert to depth-first search instead of carving out your own, unique path in life. This would also mean it would be much, much easier to…

I do agree to some extent, but depth-first search is not the correct allegory for the algorithm. You do follow a node to the end with depth-first. I think you meant breadth-first.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#299

Post by ben_w »

teekert wrote: post #284
acwan93 wrote: post #8

This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”: > "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,…

What I don't like about this quote is that it pretends you just have to choose between all these attractive and worthwhile goals and that the choosing is the difficult part. In reality though you may opt for a career, leave the family but fail. Or you may put your career on a lower pitch only to have your wife and you decide it won't really work out. In reality, it's more like you start to climb for a fat purple fig…

Analysis paralysis and the paradox of choice (the idea not the book) have been known about since Aesop, though I agree that in the real world we must also make do without even knowing which paths even lead to good outcomes.

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#300

Post by dm319 »

shortandsweet wrote: post #292
teekert wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't like about this quote is that it pretends you just have to choose between all these attractive and worthwhile goals and that the choosing is the difficult part. In reality though you may opt for a career, leave the family but fail. Or you may put your career on a lower pitch only to have your wife and you decide it won't really work out. In reality, it's more like you start to climb for a fat purple fig…

Why do you assume it's not your fault?

We aren't nearly as in control of our lives as we like to think, and we often construct stories and arcs to explain our paths. Actually, most of what has happened to us, whether we've been successful or not, is down to chance, starting with the family and location you were born into.
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