[Hypothetical] You can travel back in time at any point in your life and take control of your past self for up to 24 hours, what do you do with this ability?
Okay weird hypotheticals again lol:
Rules (sorry, I know someone is gonna ask for rules, cuz its a time travel scenario mmkay?):
TLDR: Basically you have 24 hours, you can end it at anytime and go back to the future, but once you end it, its over. You can only do it once. You can save this ability for any time in the future, or use it immediately.
Full rules:
Basically, you are back inside the body of your past self at any point in time after you were born. Obviously you can't bring anything back, only your consciousness goes back.
You have up to 24 hours, you can end the time travel session earlier if you want. If you loses consciousless in your past self's body, or fall asleep, the time travel session immediately ends.
You can only do this once.
You don't have to immediately use it, you can save this ability for any time in the future.
You must be awake to use it, you can't use it in the middle sleep of while unconscious. Although, you can travel back to a time when you were asleep and you would immediately wake up in your past self's body.
When you go back, your past self's memories are merged with your memory, and you keep this even when you travel back to the future.
When the time travel session ends, you return to the moment in time when you originally left, but now you are in the new timeline with a future that could have changed from your actions in the past.
Your past self would immediately resume control the moment you left, if you were still awake at the time of leaving. If your time travel session ended by losing consciousness, then your past self resume control when they wake up. Your past self would remember roughly what happened but wouldn't understand that your future self was in control (unless you leave yourself a note or record a video or something), and wouldn't retain your future memories.
If you end up in a timeline where you died before the moment in time when your left your original timeline, you basically just see the last 24 hours of yourself in the new timeline before you died, in 3rd person view, then your consciousness fades and you are gone.
Basically the point is to ask yourself: What are things in your life you wished you could change. Or what period of 24 hours would you like to revisit again.
I’m old and I like my life well enough to not want to fuck with changing things. But your rule about merging memories - I’d absolutely love to go back to any holiday in my childhood when I could see my dad, cousin, and grandma one more time. I could come back with fresh memories of them all healthy and happy. I’d sell my soul for that.
Hilariously, you only need to go back in time two days to when they minted the Luigi Mangioni coin and buy it right away (and sell at the peak). It ballooned something ridiculous like 37k% so that should set you up nicely
Not only that but imagine how hard you’d have to work at not creeping them out with how much you know about them.
My wife and I have been together for the majority of our lives. We met when we were teenagers and now we’re well into our 40s. I’ve got a sneaking feeling that if I went back and tried to romance her I’d be a terrible partner. Either I’d creep her tf out or I worry current me is too impatient.
Also, as a side note I get that ick vibe thinking about the mental age gap
I'll do like in Back to the Future and win the lottery, come back, put it in the back and live from the returns. Yes I'm that boring, but the best timeline IMO is one where I don't have to break my back working 9 to 5.
Considering the butterfly effect, I think the safest way to do it is to go back the immediate past 24 hours to have as little a domino effect as possible and prevent altering what I already have in my current life I don’t want to lose. So I’ll probably just go back to yesterday and buy a lottery ticket or something.
Like anyone else, I'd say buy stock/bitcoin, but the overlap of me being old enough to have my own bank account and the time where stocks/bitcoin was worth it is fairly slim. Maybe I'd go back to like 2019/2020 and pump all my money into Gamestop.
Buy a lottery ticket on a state where I don't have to publicly state that I won. Wait until it's close to a $1,000,000,000 USD and there was no winner. Retire. Help my family but not tell them I won. Just say I invested really well and have done extra cash.
I'd wait for a cure to alzheimer's then go back and hand over the cure to my younger self, but I doubt I'll see that cure in my lifetime. So yeah go for the money.
24h ... It would be tight but maybe doable. I would need to pinpoint the correct day in a 2 month span to do several things that require presence of other people during business hours