Practical Clairvoyance

Do you know how every month or so you think about if you could somehow travel into the past, or be reborn, with the sort of knowledge you now have — you think you could live a richer, better life? That with the knowledge of the future that you have, you could alter the course of your life, avoid the troubles, more fully relive rarer times? If I told you that you could get into an aging time machine that I made and go back into the past with all your current memories, with only the loss of your emotional regret of the mistakes you wish to correct, what would you expect of reliving your older times?

Not to come off as some heckling motivational ass, but most of us actually already have this time machine, that allows us to arrive from the future with a good idea of consequence. We have the power of foresight, and almost all of the time we expertly predict the outcome of our worse behavior. Aside from not having any a priori emotion (what we also lose in the time machine), the only things holding us back are our excuses about our own foresight, which is, if one thinks about it, completely implausible to doubt in both grounds of accuracy and utility. Foresight is easily one of our most powerful and ignored faculties. Foresight saw global warming, foresight saw nearly all of the wars and suffering in the world. Your own foresight accounted for almost every single mistake you ever made. If you could go back in time, without the emotional regret, I could do you just as good a favor by simply instilling confidence in your own foresight, and suggesting you develop an emotional perception of it.

Now go on and travel into the future for a moment. You see? Then don’t fuck up this time.