Okay, for whatever reason, I’ve been puzzling over this all day.
Suppose that you had something terrible happen to you while you were young. Maybe you were a hostage or a POW for a few years, or you survived a plane crash, or you battled a horrible drug addiction, or maybe your Dad was an alcoholic. I don’t know.
Suppose that you are now successful because of it. Maybe you got a book deal, or you speak to auditoriums full of people about it, or you were able to settle out of court with the person that wronged you for a large sum of money. The bottom line is, you’re much more successful after the event happens than you would’ve been if it had never occurred.
Now, you go to bed tonight, and when you wake up the next morning, you’ve gone back in time. It’s before whatever the event is, and it gives you an opportunity to avoid it. You can go to graduate school instead of joining the army, catch a different flight that won’t leave you stranded in the mountains and force you to eat another person to survive, or turn down that first hit of heroin.
Do go through the event again, knowing where it will lead, or do you opt out of the bad situation and forgo the success that will stem from it?
What if you decide not to go through with it? How badly does it fuck you up if you forgo it, and instead of living off royalty checks from the made for T.V. movie of your struggles, you have to get a job at a Best Buy? Even if it’s much worse in the short term, are you willing to give up the happiness you’ll get from it once it’s over? Is it possible that you will end up worse off in your 30′s because you DIDN’T spend your 20′s addicted to heroin?
I’ve given this a lot more thought today than is probably warranted. I’m also suspicious that it’s one of those things that isn’t that interesting to other people; it’s like listening to a teenager who just realized that racism is bad or has recently discovered Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I probably just spent my day thinking about something that’s covered in a Saved By The Bell Episode.
Anyway, here’s a Prodigy video. You know those older people that are desperately trying to cling to youth, and part of that is convincing themselves that bands that they listened to in high school are still cool and edgy, even though the band is something like 20 years old now and hasn’t really been doing anything relevant since Bill Clinton was president, and some people would argue that they weren’t really even relevant back then?
I’m that guy now.
Either way, I can’t help it. The Prodigy have a new album coming out next month, and so far, I like what I hear.
Stay Classy, bitches.