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Advice You Would Give to Your 12 Year-Old Self?
urbazewski asks: "If you could send a message back to your nerdy
unpopular 12 year old self, what would you say? I've been asking this one for several years, and the replies sound suspiciously like the lame advice I got from adults at that age ('just be yourself, dear'). The most creative answer was from an American-born Buddhist monk, who didn't think his 12 year old self would
listen to a message along the lines of 'Hey, what you're doing is kind of making things suck for me right now' --- he would send
a message to himself by adding extra lyrics to a song he really liked when he was in junior high school. I got the best replies from a large class at
UC Santa Cruz. The modal answer was 'Buy Microsoft.' About 7% of the class said 'Enjoy yourself in high school because college is really hard.' Another 7% said "Study harder in high school because college is really hard.' (The
best variant on that theme: 'Try to figure out what "studying" is'). In the hindsight-is-20/20 dept. there was a girl who said 'Do not date the
following people...' and then listed six names and a guy who said 'You know how you're thinking about trying to drive your dad's car? Don't!.' My personal favorite: 'You're a dork now, but don't worry, you'll be cool when
you're in college.'"
Because all adults will tell you is what they wished _they_ had done.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Nah, the universe is fractal in nature, every choice branching off into multiple realities, ad infinitum.
The you at age 12 would still exist, as one single event of a miltiple of you before you contacted yourself, none of which would be contacted.
If you did take your own advice (and...would you? I mean I'd tell myself to go fuck myself, personally) then, the you after the point just before you contacted yourself would be wiped out, quite possibly, but the you before you were contacted would still exist, and without the you from the future of that line in time, to pass the fututre message, you wouldn't do it.
In other words, you'd wipe out everything in one possible universe from the point of contact if you did commit suicide, but not before it, and it would still continue from the point where your message fails to appear as if nothing had happened, which of course is true unless you make the same decisions exactly as you did the first time round from that point onward, in that timeline, leading to you contacting yourself in the past, which is not guaranteed not least of which because of a universal cognisance of the event which took place leaving a dissonance in it's wake, spreading backward and outward, so that at least at some point you'd not comply, realising the stupidity of your behaviour and eventually boring yourself/ves of the repetition of the fundementally self-destructive non-beneficial act and get on with doing something more positive instead, tike putting the telly on or something.
Possibly.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
and: "Next Thursdays winning lotto numbers are:..."
I read a study recently (I tried googling for it and couldn't find it) that basically tracked lottery winners over a five year period following their wins. It said that when they first recieved their money their overall happiness jumped a great deal, as described here. It then tracked their happiness for the remaining five years.
The interesting part is that almost uniformally every single winner's happiness receded back to what it was before they won. It seems that everyone has a "base happiness" that cannot be altered by material things in the long term. I believe that everyone needs enough money for sustenance and comfort, and after that it's all vanity.
Hey asshead, this guy was 12 in 1982. The only people who had computers in 82 were rich geeky college kids and big companies. Just because you were 12 in 1998 doesn't mean everyone was.
No need to call someone an asshead. There are many instances of folks who owned computers back then and they were not rich or part of a big company. I mowed lawns for two years and purchased my first computer, an Apple ][+ in 1981. At the time, we were definately not well to do. That computer got me my first job ( at age 12 in 1982) at our local school of medicine as the tech support guy (before that was a title) for all the MD's and PhD's running Visicalc and such on their Apples and TRS-80's.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Dear 12 year-old self,
Your life is about to be forever changed. You don't know it now, but in three years, you're going to be in millions of households world-wide.
Everywhere you go, people are going to scream at you that they hate you. Listen to this advice, 12 year-old self, because I know that nobody else is going to give it to you: whatever you do,don't listen to them, and let them define your sense of self-worth. It's going to hurt, a lot. You won't understand it, and you'll try really hard to convince them otherwise, but they will not listen . . . because they're just as insecure and confused as you are right now. You're going to want to quit the show, but if you do, you'll be 30 before you stop regretting it. Trust me on this one.
Stay on that show until it's over, and when you're older, you'll realize that for every person who screamed "I hate you," there is another who was quietly inspired by something you did. It all balances out, kid.
You are never going to be cool, no matter how hard you try, so save yourself the agony of trying to fit in. You end up marrying a real hottie who loves your inner geek.
And register wilwheaton.com before someone else picks it up.
OH! And when you're 22, and you're in a bar in New York, just say, "No, thank you." You'll understand why when the time comes.