Why It's Not Worth Going Back to Change the Past
People often ask me what I'd change if I could go back in time or if I have anything that I regret. I always give them the same answer.
I don't want to change the past. I don't think it's worth it. Even if I don't like a decision I made, it taught me something so that I don't make that mistake again. If I didn't have that experience, I'd probably end up making the mistake again, just later in life and possibly with worse consequences. My past is what makes me who I am and I'm only playing with the cards I've been dealt.
For example, I got hit in the face with an angle grinder about a year ago. People have asked me if I wished I could go back and make sure I had a face shield. Even though I have a scar across my chin from it, I wouldn't change things. It's become a part of who I am now. It's made me think more about the choices I make when it comes to safety, especially around power tools. It's also a conversation starter sometimes (in both good and bad ways) because it gives me an icebreaker story to tell. It adds depth to me as a person even though it kept me from going to competition last summer. It's actually the opening question my potential boyfriend used when we first started talking.
Sure, I've made some decisions in the past that I probably shouldn't have. I probably shouldn't have started hanging out with the guy in my first semester engineering class that wanted me for sex and would pin me down on the floor or his beanbag and lay on top of me asking if I wanted it. Turns out, he was trying to use me to cheat on his girlfriend, but he only wanted sex. When I said no, he told his girlfriend that I'd come onto him so she sent me a really long Facebook message one night passive-aggressively telling me to back off. That guy hadn't even texted me since the end of exam week. I probably should have walked away from him long before I did, but I felt like I was stuck there. It wasn't necessarily my smartest moment, but it doesn't change the fact that I've learned from it and now know more about both others and myself. I don't regret it happening because he could have done much much worse to me. He could have forced me much further than he actually did.
You might ask if I would take away my depression and anxiety. The answer is still no. Sure, it's a bit of a nuisance when it's really bad, but it also allows me to relate to others with anxiety or depression. It makes me understand mental health more than most others and allows me to know what it feels like to be in someone else's shoes when I try to be there for them when they're having a battle with their own anxiety or depression. It allows me to connect with one of my best friends and be there when he needs someone. It gives me an appreciation for the happy moments in life and the good days that happen. It makes me think about what I have in my life and reminds me that I have people that love and care about me.
When you think about it, does time really exist as a linear object? Personally, I don't think it does. I've had too many occurrences of déjà vu and have seen too many episodes of Doctor Who to consider time anything other than a "big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff" . The number of times I've felt like I've experienced an exact moment before makes me question what reality really is. I don't mean the feeling of doing the same thing over and over again like a routine, but having the same non-routine moment occur multiple times, or at least feel like it has. Maybe our déjà vu is really us catching a glimpse or remembering small bits and pieces of our last temporal loop. I don't necessarily want to go into a discussion of déjà vu in this post, so I'm going to leave a pin in this conversation.
Anyone that knows me knows that I almost never know what day of the week it is. The only reason my posts come out on the right day is because I schedule them. I can usually tell you the date, but sometimes, I can't even do that. I used to say that it was because I didn't necessarily need to know what day of the week it was. I always managed to go to the right classes on the right day, so did it really matter if I knew what that day was called? I tended to base my perception of "day of the week" off of whether it felt like it was even or odd. Even days are: Tuesday, Thursday, and sometimes Sunday. Odd days are: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. People still question me on that one, but just roll with it.
I'm pretty sure that if I went back into the past and changed anything, even something as simple as what color socks I decided to wear that day, I'd change my entire timeline. I'm not exactly happy with all of the events in my timeline, but it's been pretty okay. Just imagine if someone went back in time and killed Hitler. We might all be dead from some meteor by now or it might have caused someone to be born today that's ten times worse than Hitler. We don't really know. Maybe if I went back in time and changed my socks, I'd create a rip in the space time continuum that created a paradox so massive, that I destroyed the entire universe. Who knows? If time is non-linear, that means that anything I changed could change anything else, regardless of how big or small the change is. Maybe in Stephen Hawking's time travel experiment (the one where he had a party and sent out the invites the day after), his time travel self decided to change what color socks he was wearing right before going to the party and by some crazy time and space fate, managed to make his Deathday occur on Pi Day.
One place I know time exists in a non-linear fashion is in our memories. How often do you find yourself jumping through memories that are related to each other? If it were a linear system, you couldn't just think about one specific category of things. You'd have to follow that entire timeline linearly. Maybe you just want to remember one specific thing, like how happy your significant other makes you feel and to do that, you think of all of the good memories of them. It would be a lot harder to do that if it were organized linearly. I don't know about anyone else, but when I think about my potential boyfriend, something from three weeks ago pops in my head right before something from yesterday and something from over a month ago right after that.
Another place that time exists non-linearly is when you're dreaming. One tactic to figure out if you're dreaming is to look at something that should show time passing. When you're dreaming, your sense of time doesn't really exist which is why it can be all over the place. That's why you can look at a clock and see the time change rapidly. Sometimes, I have the problem where my dreams end up being so realistic that in addition to my inability to keep up with my sense of time makes it hard to distinguish dreams from reality. I've gone through entire days only to realize that I'm dreaming.
If time can exist non-linearly there, why can't it exist like that in reality? Maybe that's why our perception of time changes so much. Maybe it's why time seems to fly when you're doing one thing, but drone on when you're doing another. After all, time is a man-made concept. Maybe we really do exist in one big ball of time that doesn't really follow a pattern. We only say it's a certain date because we follow a calendar we made. What if that isn't really true? What if time is completely different for each person. What if that's why some people feel like they're really somewhere (or somewhen) else when we don't perceive the same thing.
If time did exist linearly and if I change my past to change my future, who is to say that my past isn't my future? Maybe how I change my future changes my past in a way. I know that might not seem reasonable, but our memories are susceptible to change. How we remember an event isn't usually exactly how it happened. Maybe it is and something in our future changes how that past event happened. Maybe the fact I decided to wear green socks today instead of red socks changes something minor in the past that updates in my memory because I experienced it in the past. Maybe my dream self changes my past or future as well. Maybe my dream self is another existence of who I am in a different reality or universe. Wouldn't that be trippy?
Now that I've confused myself (and probably you too), I restate my original idea. I don't want to change my past. I feel this way not only because I don't want to break the delicate structure of space and time, but because I also feel that my past and present shape who I am as a person and that's not worth changing because I could very easily make things much much worse for myself and others. Just imagine if I were a chaotic evil type....
Written: 22 March 2018
Sure, I've made some decisions in the past that I probably shouldn't have. I probably shouldn't have started hanging out with the guy in my first semester engineering class that wanted me for sex and would pin me down on the floor or his beanbag and lay on top of me asking if I wanted it. Turns out, he was trying to use me to cheat on his girlfriend, but he only wanted sex. When I said no, he told his girlfriend that I'd come onto him so she sent me a really long Facebook message one night passive-aggressively telling me to back off. That guy hadn't even texted me since the end of exam week. I probably should have walked away from him long before I did, but I felt like I was stuck there. It wasn't necessarily my smartest moment, but it doesn't change the fact that I've learned from it and now know more about both others and myself. I don't regret it happening because he could have done much much worse to me. He could have forced me much further than he actually did.
You might ask if I would take away my depression and anxiety. The answer is still no. Sure, it's a bit of a nuisance when it's really bad, but it also allows me to relate to others with anxiety or depression. It makes me understand mental health more than most others and allows me to know what it feels like to be in someone else's shoes when I try to be there for them when they're having a battle with their own anxiety or depression. It allows me to connect with one of my best friends and be there when he needs someone. It gives me an appreciation for the happy moments in life and the good days that happen. It makes me think about what I have in my life and reminds me that I have people that love and care about me.
When you think about it, does time really exist as a linear object? Personally, I don't think it does. I've had too many occurrences of déjà vu and have seen too many episodes of Doctor Who to consider time anything other than a "big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff" . The number of times I've felt like I've experienced an exact moment before makes me question what reality really is. I don't mean the feeling of doing the same thing over and over again like a routine, but having the same non-routine moment occur multiple times, or at least feel like it has. Maybe our déjà vu is really us catching a glimpse or remembering small bits and pieces of our last temporal loop. I don't necessarily want to go into a discussion of déjà vu in this post, so I'm going to leave a pin in this conversation.
Anyone that knows me knows that I almost never know what day of the week it is. The only reason my posts come out on the right day is because I schedule them. I can usually tell you the date, but sometimes, I can't even do that. I used to say that it was because I didn't necessarily need to know what day of the week it was. I always managed to go to the right classes on the right day, so did it really matter if I knew what that day was called? I tended to base my perception of "day of the week" off of whether it felt like it was even or odd. Even days are: Tuesday, Thursday, and sometimes Sunday. Odd days are: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. People still question me on that one, but just roll with it.
I'm pretty sure that if I went back into the past and changed anything, even something as simple as what color socks I decided to wear that day, I'd change my entire timeline. I'm not exactly happy with all of the events in my timeline, but it's been pretty okay. Just imagine if someone went back in time and killed Hitler. We might all be dead from some meteor by now or it might have caused someone to be born today that's ten times worse than Hitler. We don't really know. Maybe if I went back in time and changed my socks, I'd create a rip in the space time continuum that created a paradox so massive, that I destroyed the entire universe. Who knows? If time is non-linear, that means that anything I changed could change anything else, regardless of how big or small the change is. Maybe in Stephen Hawking's time travel experiment (the one where he had a party and sent out the invites the day after), his time travel self decided to change what color socks he was wearing right before going to the party and by some crazy time and space fate, managed to make his Deathday occur on Pi Day.
One place I know time exists in a non-linear fashion is in our memories. How often do you find yourself jumping through memories that are related to each other? If it were a linear system, you couldn't just think about one specific category of things. You'd have to follow that entire timeline linearly. Maybe you just want to remember one specific thing, like how happy your significant other makes you feel and to do that, you think of all of the good memories of them. It would be a lot harder to do that if it were organized linearly. I don't know about anyone else, but when I think about my potential boyfriend, something from three weeks ago pops in my head right before something from yesterday and something from over a month ago right after that.
Another place that time exists non-linearly is when you're dreaming. One tactic to figure out if you're dreaming is to look at something that should show time passing. When you're dreaming, your sense of time doesn't really exist which is why it can be all over the place. That's why you can look at a clock and see the time change rapidly. Sometimes, I have the problem where my dreams end up being so realistic that in addition to my inability to keep up with my sense of time makes it hard to distinguish dreams from reality. I've gone through entire days only to realize that I'm dreaming.
If time can exist non-linearly there, why can't it exist like that in reality? Maybe that's why our perception of time changes so much. Maybe it's why time seems to fly when you're doing one thing, but drone on when you're doing another. After all, time is a man-made concept. Maybe we really do exist in one big ball of time that doesn't really follow a pattern. We only say it's a certain date because we follow a calendar we made. What if that isn't really true? What if time is completely different for each person. What if that's why some people feel like they're really somewhere (or somewhen) else when we don't perceive the same thing.
If time did exist linearly and if I change my past to change my future, who is to say that my past isn't my future? Maybe how I change my future changes my past in a way. I know that might not seem reasonable, but our memories are susceptible to change. How we remember an event isn't usually exactly how it happened. Maybe it is and something in our future changes how that past event happened. Maybe the fact I decided to wear green socks today instead of red socks changes something minor in the past that updates in my memory because I experienced it in the past. Maybe my dream self changes my past or future as well. Maybe my dream self is another existence of who I am in a different reality or universe. Wouldn't that be trippy?
Now that I've confused myself (and probably you too), I restate my original idea. I don't want to change my past. I feel this way not only because I don't want to break the delicate structure of space and time, but because I also feel that my past and present shape who I am as a person and that's not worth changing because I could very easily make things much much worse for myself and others. Just imagine if I were a chaotic evil type....
Written: 22 March 2018