'Would You Like to Reload a Previous Save?' (➤Yes / No)

A common maladaptive daydream I have is imagining that I wake up and I'm much younger again, spontaneously and miraculously, with all of my knowledge and understanding still intact. Magically, I find myself back at a specific age in my life, and I can redo everything all over again from that point on.

For me, I always imagine awakening to find myself twelve and in grade six again. Back when I would walk down 17th Avenue travelling home after elementary school ended to take care of our four cats—we adopted one off Kijiji and she ended up having three kittens—and I'd always walk in and open a large can of chicken-tuna flavoured wet food and watch them hungrily scurry in excitement.

The kittens—Cream, Lynx, and Jeremiah—were a highlight during an otherwise difficult point in my life. I felt lonely, and I was being bullied at school (more so by teachers than students), not to mention my overworked single mom was struggling to take care of me and my little brother on her own, in a city she'd just moved to where she didn't know anybody.

I think I choose this time specifically because I feel as though I can right the most wrongs and adjust course most significantly, while still being old enough to do so. I would be a better older brother to Byron, who just entered the first grade, so I could take some of the pressure off my mom's shoulders. I would avoid talking to weird older teenagers on MSN Messenger, which would only cause me further social isolation in the years to come.

And of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg. To be transplanted back in time would mean you would have so much foresight and wisdom to reinvest. So much extra time to learn what I've been putting off, so much capability to avoid all the regrets and mistakes I've made over the years. Of course, the monetary gains are obvious as well—you'd always be able to bet on the right horse. I could use my birthday money when I turned fourteen and buy Bitcoin when it only cost a few cents per BTC.

I could learn how to whistle and roll my R's before grade seven instead of after. I'd take Byron to the wave pool before summer ended instead of promising it every June and letting it slide. I'd learn to skate at Shaw Millennium before it was renamed Cowboys. And I'd be able to make sure we kept our four cats after we moved farther south when I was in junior high.

You can see why it's such a compelling daydream. There are so many decisions to make right, so many points in life where you could have done the correct thing and avoided hurt and pain.

But when you really start to think about it, there is also so much you lose. Nearly everything, actually. Every journal entry and poem and thought I ever had is gone. Every coding project I sunk hours into. All 280 posts and over 500,000 words on this site, gone. Would I be able to re-write them all? Would I even want to? There would be fields upon fields of the unrecoverable.

Your favourite music and books and films you'd have to wait for them to exist. I'd witness every disaster again, every cultural rise and fall. I'd sit through the hundred hours of schooling again that I wouldn't need. Only to arrive again at the handful of things worth keeping—the essay I read that changed how I write essays, the album that got me through painful winters.

And, far more existentially, what about relationships? What if you weren't able to reconnect with the people you found and loved the first time? What if it didn't work out? (Rick and Morty, surprisingly, did a good job visualizing the horror that can be found here.)

But there is actually an incredibly useful meditation here. For we are not at the edge of time, only able to look backwards. We are currently on a continuum of our life, unknowingly somewhere in the middle.

And in the future, there's a version of you that's looking back at where you are. Right now. As you're reading this very sentence. And they wish desperately, more than anything, to go back to this point. Identical to how I yearn to go back to feeding three hungry kittens after school.

You don't need a magical impossibility, you don't need to fantasize about something that will never happen. Time moves forward.

There's a version of you, ten years from now. Wherever they are and whatever they're doing, the memory of reading this will surface. The version of you ten years from now won't remember the big things nearly as clearly as they'll remember the temperature of the room you're currently in, and the sound your chair makes as you shift your weight. The version of you ten years from today would trade anything for one more ordinary day, the kind of day you're having right now. Not the bullshit highlight reel of wedding days and manufactured ceremonies. But this. Unremarkable and unrecorded, already slipping past you while you decide whether or not it's worth paying attention to.

That version of you, ten years from now, is standing at the end of the doorway made of days like today. They're looking back and trying to find you. The doorway is already halfway closed.

Although we don't have the foresight to see exactly how the world plays out, or to make incredible financial gains, we do have the capacity to act differently right now. I don't know exactly what the forty-year-old version of me in 2036 would want me to be doing right now, but I do know what I'd want the twenty-year-old version of me to be doing. And that's a good enough starting point, I think.