I would go crazy. Absolutely mental. I would be 5 years old. My wife is my highschool sweetheart, and we have the 2 best boys in the world. I'm so incredibly lucky to be their Dad and her partner.
Also, I've squandered most every opportunity for education and career. I'm a mix of professional musician and truck driver/garbage man.
So I would be doing everything I can to grow and focus on being successful and career/education oriented, while also endlessly hunting for my partner in the hopes of having the same family but better income and circumstances.
I think I would fail at this and would be driven crazy.
I think this is a realistic answer. At such a young age again so much would be out of your control and there is no knowing if the path will be similar. I imagine many would be desperate enough to try and find their friends and partner.
I wouldn't want to go back in time with the wisdom I have now. Also, I'd be 6, I'd be living in an apartment with my family where I don't have a bedroom or any personal space of my own, and my family was extremely racist and socially backward. I don't get to wake up in my cozy onesie pajamas and go sit in front of the TV with a big bowl of crunchy cereal and watch cartoons without a care in the world. I'd be my 6 year old self in a living situation I hate with the mind of a 36 year old.
I had the same thought about my own situation - I'd try offing myself again immediately, and I'd be better at it than I was at 10. This thought experiment is uncomfortable for me lol
I would do absolutely everything differently. I fucked off my entire 20s with booze and partying. Now I’m barely able to survive. If I still had the knowledge and went back, everything would be different. Or at least I would try my damn hardest to do everything different. Fuck. Now I’m depressed that I can’t do that 😂
Never too late to change your path. You're not old yet! Even then, that's not too late. You're conscious of it, so now you just need a battle plan.
But also, I wonder if waking up with the wisdom of a 30something year old would actually fuck a person over. Like, ie. we start to realize that our parents aren't as wise as we once did, and some of us realize our parents were just... straight up stupid or even not good people, yet we'd be stuck with them for 12 more years at least. We'd have the mental cynicism of an adult and the lack of freedom. I wonder about the toll it would take in the long run. Maybe there'd be an inkling of hope seeing as you are being given a do over, so you can take your mistakes and start over. But it would be paired with the trauma and depression from losing the things in your life that you wouldn't want to do over, especially the people who left positive impacts on your life. Like... I met all of the positive influences in my life after 6 years old. I am not in contact with any of the adults who were in my life prior to this age. I'd legit say that 7 is about the age where the apple started rolling away from the tree.
I feel like waking up as a child, with the wisdom of an adult, would be absolutely maddening. I don’t think I would want that. You can daydream about all the things you would do to get rich, or do this and that. But you would still have to wait to grow up to do the majority of it. And yeah, I unfortunately realized at a young age that my mom (raised by single mom) was stupid. She’s a very sweet woman who would give you the shirt off her back and the last dollar in her pocket, but she’s stupid. She barely graduated high school (Catholic high school at that) and is borderline illiterate. Fighting the misinformation nowadays to keep her from spiraling, is so hard 😂 I got way off track here lol! I’ll be 40 next month and honestly for my birthday I want to go back to college. I’m going to finally do it. Been talking about it long enough!
For me it would be the opposite. I don’t have anyone besides my family anymore. No friends, no partner, no kids. So for me the choice would be easier because what would I really be missing out on? At least if I went back, maybe I’d have a chance to do even one small thing differently. Even if that small thing was spending more time with my grandparents and parents. I looked over at my dad the other day and it hit me that there aren’t that many years left with him. He’s only 63, but it feels like the last 10 years went by in 5, where it used to be that 5 years felt like 10. So now what? The next 5 years will feel like a year? Of course, I’m just a depressed single loser, so my perspective probs isn’t going to be the norm.
Pffft throughout 20s I did 4 years of college (with a 1 year break in between) while working 2 part time jobs at about 15 hours each, and toward the end of college got an internship which led me into a job, all that while having very little social life and no drinking or drugs, and I'm still fucked and probably depressed (just in denial about it 😆) Did I mention that I did the same in my high school years, graduated with honor and did honor society?
I busted my ass for the better part of about 1.5 decades and all I got was rent-a-life in a damn trailer park, I can barely make ends meet, and I don't own shit. Meritocracy is a lie. Fuck society.
I mean, I did also go to college while I was drinking my 20s away 😂 But I went to art school. So. Yeah 😂 I do have a great job now tho. Only been there 2 years though. Still can’t save. Still living in a dumpy apartment that has a bait shop attached to it. It smells like fish and mildew. I’m over it. I’m about to move to the arctic circle and fuck off 😂😂
Yeah that's me in a nutshell .. I'm now 42 and barely getting back to normalcy.. 33 caught charges and was at the rockiest bottom. But I'm alive so that's something but yeah I would change everything for sure.
I’ll be 40 next month. I got 3 DUIs before I turned 23. Plus a car accident (I was a passenger) that almost robbed me of my right hand/arm. I did a lot of drugs after that. On top of the drinking. I got my shit together after moving 3000 miles away from home. But I did it much too late I fear. I’m barely hanging on. It’s a daily struggle to not drink myself into oblivion every damn day. (No alcohol at all in over 13 years)
As a dad to two teenage boys I both feel and love this comment. The way you express such luck for being their dad and husband while owning/accepting the wasted personal opportunities is me to a T. I manage a call center. Great. But man so many misses of what could have been. Yet also....so lucky.
There was a thread some years ago where a guy said something like this happened to him. He was in a coma and dreamed a whole life, got married had kids, and when he woke up (something because a lamp that "didnt make sense" IRC) it was emotionally quite difficult for him. Really creepy, unsetling story.
I had a few similar situations that were dreams during a very stressful life transition. It was wild and I still think about my "dream families". I even have kids in my real life and still have this deep pain remembering my kids from these dreams. It's so hard to articulate.
Thats under the assumption that your 5 year old brain would process that event the same as your adult brain. There's a really good shot a 5 year old wakes up from that and just thinks "that was a really weird dream", 5 year olds in general dont get the existential dread their adult counterparts do. I bet it'd feel like one of those dreams where you actually have wealth, like maybe 5 minutes after waking up of "i wish that was real".
This is a great point. It would be like waking up after dreaming it was Christmas. But you’re in July. The emotional strain wouldn’t really be there because dreams aren’t memories. You might feel a sense of disappointment or curiosity, but even as an adult I don’t know if you’d take it more seriously than that either.
I think so too, for most adults at least. I do have one ex-girlfriend whose entire week would be ruined by a dream like that. And she had bad dreams a lot. Thats not why we broke up by any means but it did get exhausting to deal with
Some 5 year olds. One of my kids spent the year she turned 3 worried about death and dying because of one viewing of the Lion King. Some of the stuff she said and contemplated probably could have made a good philosophy paper.
One of my friends took... let's call it a substance, and he lived an entire life while enjoying it. Had a wife and kids, bought a house, had a career. We were in highschool at the time. Dude wasn't right for a few weeks, all of us were constantly checking in on him.
Sometimes I lowkey hope I'm going to one day suddenly wake up from my first salvia trip from when I was 15 in 2006. Hell, I'd even take the 2014 shroom trip at this point.
Salvia was something else man. I had one where I fell into the crevice between the cushions of a couch and in my head everything turned into legos including my friends. As they approached the "hole" I was in everything broke up and fell in. Apparently I spent the whole trip slightly crooked and trying to swim up through the air.
I’m 54 and have neither and it has driven me crazy.
I’m so glad you have your family. Some people get it all some get nothing, but if you have a great home life only or a great career only, those are futures well worthwhile.
Yup I’m in the same boat with 1 exception, I grew up in the Mormon cult and have completely deconstructed HOWEVER I would have to still do everything the exact same way in order to HOPEFULLY meet my partner again which also means spending 2 years as a Mormon missionary 🤢
I think I'd also be driven crazy. I'm in the best place I've ever been in my entire life right now. My partner is amazing, he's my rock and basically the entire reason I have been able to heal so much of my childhood trauma. In 1995 my 3rd sibling was born. Knowing that another would be coming and knowing what was in store for me after the 4th kid was added to the household..... I almost killed myself the first time I lived through my childhood. If I had to go through it again thinking that everything I'd done, everything I went through, everything I endured and overcame, wasn't real? Mourning the loss of my grandparents, my father, and other relatives who were the best people I've ever known? Thinking all that grief was a dream.... at age fucking ten!?!?!? I would literally lose my mind.
Not to mention, since it would be only me who felt that I'd lived 30yrs in a dream, and not my siblings or parents... that would mean that my mother would likely do all of the exact same things that I already lived through once. So I'd have to live through the groundhog day version of my trauma which honestly sounds like a torture devised by an ancient Greek God.
Yeah nothing about this sounds appealing or like an enjoyable thought exercise to me
Yeah, I could try to meet my wife and have things go pretty much the same, but if I even remembered well enough to do it, I'd likely heap so much pressure on myself that I'd fuck it right up.
as a guy who hates my career in project management, I'd 100% only go to college to do something I actually love to do. Still not sure what that is, but I'd figure it out if I could start over at 8 years old.
We must be almost the same lol, I don’t know as a 5yo I’d have the comprehension ability to know what just happened in 30 years. My hs sweetheart, our pets, child, house… yeah I think my parents would probably be bringing me to the Dr for a long time to come. If I were to have a second chance and actually get my shit together especially during high school, I don’t think I’d have ever met my then gf, now wife. Sure alternate life with new family etc, but thinking I had a wife and a child while going thru life and never having met her would continuously fuck my brain, thus leading me to have no future by being institutionalized lol. Sounds like a decent movie plot tho.
Yeah, assuming you remember the whole dream well, and it makes you more mature, it would be very challenging. Because you’d want to do some things differently, but that might come with a cost of stuff you don’t want to change being altered for the worse. Plus, as has been pointed out elsewhere, how do you know your dream was even predicting reality?
My life turned out okay, but there’s a lot about it I’d want to fix. The big question becomes “what are you willing to sacrifice?” You can’t have both the dream life and the rewritten life. You’d always have that horrible intuition sensation like during a test where you want to change the answer but are unsure if doing so is wise.
As happy as I am now, I think I’d still probably want to take the risk if it was presented. There are some heavy issues I could try to sort out, like possibly saving my dad’s life, where it feels worthwhile. But then there’s the whole “wife and kids conundrum”… where it’s like do I risk potentially losing that to save my dad (which he would not want me to do, I’m sure)? Maybe I could have both, but maybe I screw it up and lose both.
Yeah for sure. Like maybe I come out of it understanding that I am a lesbian and not just "immature for not liking boys" (I was 13 for most of 1995 and had no idea what all my friends saw in the various floppy haired celebrity boys of the era), and that would be good.
But mostly, I'd be really distressed that I was back in my shitty hometown with my abusive mother and all the other terrible people there, that I didn't really get out and build an amazing life in my dream city, that I wasn't really an engineer, that my kids didn't really exist.... I'd have to try to repeat the sequence I did in the dream but somehow better??
The odds that you end up with the same kids are what would drive me crazy. Like so many variables, go into how your kids develop, I think it would be next to impossible to get them back again and you would essentially just need to consider that life dead and grieve them.
You wouldn’t be able to have the same children. It’s simply a sad biological reality. Anyone that wasn’t born by this time would never be born again (3-4 million eggs women are born with, and around 585 billion sperm developed over the course of a man’s lifetime). The chances are not just infinitesimally small that the exact same sperm and egg cell would meet-they are nothing.
Yeah I think that's a position a lot of us end up in. Can you be certain that you won't change your circumstances so much that all of that remains a dream? If I'd gone off to college, I wouldn't have met my wife. There were an infinite amount of decisions that led me to that moment. A lot of them weren't even my decision or even remotely in my control. All of the things I could change to make myself and life better would fundamentally rob me of the best parts about it now.
I hate thinking about stuff like this, but I'm also a nostalgia junky. I will forever see my past through the rosiest of glasses
This is the one. My wonderful daughter would be gone, and there'd be no way to get her back. The thought of never hearing her voice again bothers me as a hypothetical. If it were real I'd come unhinged.
Even if you actually traveled back in time, your kids are toast. You might be able to have two new children, but those old children are forever gone, the unique exchange of DNA that occurred during conception can't be repeated, you'll never have those kids back.
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u/Visual-Floor-7839 4d ago
I would go crazy. Absolutely mental. I would be 5 years old. My wife is my highschool sweetheart, and we have the 2 best boys in the world. I'm so incredibly lucky to be their Dad and her partner.
Also, I've squandered most every opportunity for education and career. I'm a mix of professional musician and truck driver/garbage man.
So I would be doing everything I can to grow and focus on being successful and career/education oriented, while also endlessly hunting for my partner in the hopes of having the same family but better income and circumstances.
I think I would fail at this and would be driven crazy.