Nope, I made it up while bored out of my mind at work and trying to think of random scenarios just as thought experiments. This one seemed good enough to share, but I’m not a good judge of what people are into, I can remove it if it’s shit.
This may be one of the better ideas I’ve read so far. Incredible, kudos!
I think you caught me there on a verbiage technicality.
I probably should have worded it better in the additional details of the premise, but my intent was that your old self simply doesn’t exist in this timeline. Your family is there, but they had some other kid instead of you on the same date you were born.
If your name is Jarnathan Smith, you like baseball and your favorite color is puce, you’d instead find that your family had a kid named Archideld Smith who likes rugby and whose favorite color is mauve.
Yep…you have a diary which likely covers big life events and chunks of recent history, but I hope you’re a good actor.
My thoughts were similar to what others had suggested, find some way to simulate an accident, some sort of head trauma, or a serious illness to help sell why you suddenly can’t remember much and why your personality is different. But I think a whole lot is going to require trying to be as invisible as possible for a while and try to pick up context clues from observing people around you.
And in the scenario above, even if simply explaining your situation honestly didn’t suddenly kill you, I would hate to imagine the reaction of these parents who realize their child is effectively dead and has been replaced by some sort of fae changeling.
Well you’re in luck, one bonus of the scenario is stipulated in the body of the post!
Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby)
2002… uff, that would be hard. As a ten year old there is so little you can do!
Yep, that’s the catch! You have the knowledge, but who’s gonna let a 10-year-old open an investment account? Or who’s going to believe that a presumably middle-of-the-pack 4th grader suddenly unlocked the secret to mRNA vaccines?
I’m with you, I think identity theft is probably the easiest way to start out (especially back then when it was so widespread, and not as many people knew what to look out for) but it becomes one more secret to have to keep covered up that can screw you over later if found out.
Yep. My household in 2002 had a computer, but that’s because I had a parent who worked in IT. Most people I knew at the time didn’t have one. By 2002, ~40% of the United States still did not have access to a computer at home, though the gap would keep closing year over year.
But that’s just data for the United States. Other countries may have had lower rates of adoption at that time, and in a scenario where you would be less likely to wake up in a random household with a computer, it would require a bit more thinking to figure out how to get access to one.
I’d probably look to schools and libraries as a place to start. If that’s not an option, then it’d be figuring out how to befriend a local rich kid who might have a computer. Otherwise, the USB is effectively a paperweight for some time and you’re left only with your memories of the future for guidance until computer access becomes more available.
Yeah, I picked that year for a reason. I was going to go with 2000 at first, but thought that people would feel too inclined to have stopping 9/11 be their first priority, thereby sending the world down a radically different trajectory.
Was thinking similarly regarding the stock market situation. I wanted to accommodate a window for people to game the stock market with prior knowledge, but wanted to leave everything after the 2008 global financial crisis a mystery, so capped its predictability to 2007.
Absolutely!
Luckily everyone gets a Wikipedia backup detailing all of the things people won Nobel Prizes for up until 2025, so you have that advantage going for you.
Problem is how to make it seem realistic for an 18-year-old to accomplish, and how to actually go about doing the thing on your own.
The youngest Nobel laureate was 17 at the time, though, so it is possible.
I guess more accurately I killed whatever 10 year old you magically mind swapped with, haha.
Might be my fault for including that as one of the example goals in the body of the post. I also put “Earn a Nobel Prize by age 18” for anyone who wouldn’t be motivated by money, I’d be interested to know those takes as well.
For the sake of the scenario, in addition to the details listed in the body of the post, assume the USB drive is type A and is readable by any PC with a USB type A connector, regardless of generation. It can also be read regardless of file system.
There’s an inherent supernatural element to the premise, so assume “it just works.” There can be a specialized browser on the drive as well if you feel like you wouldn’t be able to make use of the raw HTML files.
For any Israeli not spending the rest of their lives in jail, DNA tests for all of the rest. If they have markers that say their ancestors are from that area, they can stay. Every other one gets shipped back to their parent countries or any country that will take them.
Not sure I like the idea of genetic purity tests as qualifiers to live in a country, for any country.
I think a lot of it comes down to how people were taught math.
In my generation, it was almost all rote memorization. You memorize times tables. You memorize the steps to do long division. You memorize specific formulas. And then you have to draft it all into proofs to explain why things work, but you were never really taught why things work in the first place. The answer was always “It just does.”
Rather than rote memorization, a better use of time for younger students is to focus more on the logic of math, to really get that “why” component before asking them to complete dozens of repetitive problems for homework.
Other parts of it might also just come down to entertainment value, to be honest. Here’s where my perspective veers further into anecdote, but maybe it rings true for others, I don’t know.
Learning about aphantasia was a new one for me. I don’t have it, but I am acquainted with two people who do, and both of those people did well at math in school but hated history and literature. On the other hand, those were my favorite subjects, because being able to immerse myself in a story or put myself in a certain time and place made those subjects more bearable, sometimes fun.
It occurred to me that the way they felt reading books was probably a lot like how I felt doing math: just a lot of reading information on a page and memorizing important details to regurgitate later for some assessment or another. But for them, the logic of math probably made that subject easier to engage with than something as vague as an author’s intent.
Ah so he’s just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude.
Ah yes, the movie where they cast a French person as Scottish, a Scottish person as Spanish, and an American as a Russian.
Hey, some of us are 35-year-old edgelords
And then you fuck right?