Previous writings for this blog have addressed the issue of “regret” in terms of changing our past behaviours and decisions whether that be considering the different outcomes – if only – or looking at what would not have happened if we hadn’t done what we did – only if. This post returns to that but focusses on a new aspect.
If – and, yes, its a big if – we could go back and “try again” in our life – or some particular aspect of our life the dream of the prospective time traveller is that they would return to the previous time complete with all of their knowledge of what happens as a result of the decisions that they made first time around.
Now – everyone who dreams of time travel must (I suspect) also consider the idea of travelling to the future to check out what will happen based on their current set of choices. This I will leave until a future post – the idea of “knowing” the future is in many ways an attractive one – but is it also a damaging one?
If we were “lucky” enough to get to relive our lives it would either be a straight “starting from scratch” which – inevitably would lead to the same outcomes – or we would be given the (dubious) benefit of knowing what is to come. Now – we know that – all other things being equal – if we simply follow the same tracks then we will end up at the same endpoint. That, presumably, is not what we desire in getting this second chance – so we need to change something.
Problem is – as soon as we change anything we set the world on a different trajectory. Yes – I do mean “the world” – because like the ubiquitous flapping of a butterfly’s wings the effect of our ‘little’ change can have untold consequences. The biggest consequence (as far as we are concerned as an individual) is that all the knowledge that we have brought back with us has been rendered pretty near useless – well at least all the ‘specific’ knowledge. We can still rely on the more general lessons that we had learned – but even there we need to be careful since they may be predicated on our own experience which, necessarily, is now going to change.
Will it change for the better – well, in the short term you would hope yes because all that added experience (wisdom?) that we brought to bear should be able to pick out a more advantageous set of decisions/behaviours. However – in the long term the only thing we can be sure about is that things are no longer the same – the non-same space is a rather large one encompassing, as it does, all the other possibilities except the one we already know about (and have experienced)!! Depending on the nature of the change the discrepancies from our “memory” will possibly be small to begin with – however, like the ripples that spread from the stone thrown into the middle of a lake – the longer from the initial impact we go, the bigger the area affected.
This – fundamentally – is why I would be loathe to ever say that I’d want to go back and change “just one thing” – it is impossible! The only possible “saving grace” is that ‘at least’ we would “know better” the second time around – however, as I have just suggested, we can only “know better” up to the point where we make the first deviation from the original path. Would our “accumulated wisdom” then be any good? Well, perhaps for a short time – although even there we would need to be careful – because the changed circumstances around us mean that applying that “wisdom” could – and probably would – have unexpected outcomes.
We also could find ourselves in impossible situations because some of our strategies involve what the military calls one shot weapons. We could find ourselves with two (or more) opportunities to make things “better” but know that we cannot do both. I’m not sure whether that is better or worse than an alternative scenario where we are given the opportunity to change things for the better for one person/situation but know that it is inevitably going to make things worse for someone else or some other situation.
At a superficial level being able to go back and “do it better” sounds very seductive. I contend that the reality is that there are far too many reasons why things will turn out impossibly more complicated. The “first time round” we had a big advantage – innocence – when we made mistakes, it was understandable and (usually) forgivable – if we go back again (with any memory) then it will be a case of “I should know better”!! That strikes me as a good reason to leave things well alone…
There is one further aspect – again coming from previous writing – our memories of what happened may not coincide with the reality when we go back to view it again. This sets up a real paradox for us – the very thing that we “blame” for the undesirable outcomes did not, after all, actually occur – now we must re-evalute our options – in the knowledge that we no longer know what actually was the “wrong move” the first time round – so how can we be sure to make a different choice at that moment in time?