While scrolling down on Instagram, I stumbled upon a reel about a Japanese book called Starting Over by Sugaru Miaki. I knew very little about him, and google did not help me a lot too. But I liked the synopsis of the book, so I decided to give it a try.
It was about a 20-year-old man with a perfect life of financial stability, family values, and happiness of all kinds. On his 20th birthday, he is given the chance to go back to the time when he was 10 and start all over again with all the memories and wisdom of his current life. He agrees to the offer in hopes of changing all his bad decisions into right ones back in time. What he ends up with is a life of misery and the reasons behind why he messes up his life so badly this time are unknown to him.
Very naturally a question popped up in my mind — what is the best way to spend your time if you are taken back in the past? Putting some of the people I know on the plane of time travel, I came across answers that gave me insights into the different ways people would want to use this opportunity.
To start off, there was this group that wanted to change everything they had ever done wrong. This was one of the most common responses. For every little bit of misery they had in life, they tended to blame it on past actions. Given that every one of us has our own struggles, the encounters that these people wanted to have with their younger selves ought to be interesting. For those struggling to keep up with their academic studies, their journey to the past was fueled by the intention to prevent themselves from procrastinating and wasting time on unnecessary distractions which they now regret badly.
Those who struggle financially and curse their fortunes due to a lack of generational wealth would finally like to change their luck and convince their dads to buy the inexpensive lands they always whine about not buying, which are worth millions now. I wonder how the present world would change for them.
Would their cheap plastic chairs suddenly turn into thrones made of gold? Undoubtedly, there would be some who would change events so significantly that their own existence would vanish. If someone takes a bag full of money and gives it to their grandfather in hopes of belonging to a wealthier family, odds are that the grandpa would be too rich to marry the poor grandma. When they do not meet, the time traveler will vanish from existence.
Another response was that many wanted to change the course of historic events. The intriguing part here is not the event itself, but the world that would follow if the events were altered. Who knows how advanced our world would be if the library of Alexandria was never burnt down or if people never killed themselves in wars. On a less serious note, sports fanatics would finally get the answers to their forever “what if” situations. What if Herschelle Gibbs never dropped Steve Waugh in the 1999 World Cup? The possibilities are endless, which makes this scenario all the more fun.
The view that I most resonate with is that of changing nothing at all. This notion arises from the belief that people are shaped by events in the past, and that any change in that timeline would disrupt the natural process of moulding a person, leading to the person not being the same anymore in the present. Through our struggles and experiences, we learn valuable lessons that help in shaping ourselves as unique entities with views and personalities of our own. To change a past event is to change your present self, which may not always turn out to be the way you expected it.
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