Would You Want To Be Six Again?

Like all great philosophical questions, this one came from a meme on Facebook: Would you rather receive ten million dollars now, or be six years old again with all the knowledge you’ve gained up to this point in your life? At first glance, I thought this was the dumbest question in the world. Upon further reflection, it got even dumber. Of course I would take the ten million dollars. That might seem counterintuitive. After all, if you were six years old again with all the information on what happened up through June of 2023, you’d have perfect foresight into events that were in the past for you but still in the future for everybody else. You could invest and bet your way to billions. It’s not really gambling if you always win. Even so, the costs would be too great. Do you really want to be six years old again? I put actual thought into that question, and then I wrote out those thoughts here. This is a clear abuse of the literary skills I’ve developed over the course of my lifetime. Maybe you should become six years old again to go back in time and stop me.

Imagine having the mind of an adult in the body of a six-year-old. Nobody would take you seriously. You’d have no independence. You’d also have to go to school again. At this point in my life, I’d pay money not to be trapped in a classroom. You mean I have to sit here and do everything you tell me all day, every day, until I’m twenty-two? Hard pass. I hate having anyone boss me around. In fact, I dislike it so much that, for me to follow your orders all day, you’d have to pay me. That’s called a job, and I started a secondary gig writing on the side just to get out of it. That plan backfired, and instead of getting rid of my day job, I now have a night one and a day one. Maybe I could go back in time and tell my six-year-old self to pick a path that wouldn’t lead to me working around the clock. Or maybe I could just not be six again at all.