SandbagTiara2816If you were offered knowledge of exactly when and how you'll die, would you take it? Why or why not?
Yes, so I can probably plan for it.
Yeah. Death doesn’t bother me since it’s fate. Knowing when would be handy for time management and something I could leverage. It’d be great to party at my own funeral too.
Lettuce eat lettuceCausality issues aside, yes I would. Makes a big difference if I found out I had 40+ years left vs 5 years left.
Dude you have like eighteen seconds
Quick, get this man gay sex and drugs
Wouldn’t have mattered either way then lol.
Why not?
Knowing when means I can do whatever I want until the day it happens.
jordanlundI mean, permanently or temporarily? Apparently my heart has been stopping on and off randomly all year. :(
Get this… I was in the hospital in January. I wake up, check my phone… Nurse comes in.
“Were you asleep about an hour ago?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Your heart stopped for 8 seconds.”
“. . . Um… ‘thank you’? I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information…”
Apparently it happened a few more times in March. I have an implanted heart monitor now, always watching.
MothraAmazing, from your “apparently” I take you were never awake when it happened. I wanted to ask how it feels. I have an arrhythmia that gets my heart either fluttering or skipping a beat but it happens like a couple of times a year. It feels super weird.
I’ve had a-fib and congestive heart failure, 2 heart attacks, and open heart surgery.
Each of the times my heart has stopped, I was asleep, no awareness of it until the doctors and nurses told me.
With the heart monitor, I can press a button when something feels “off”, and report symptoms like being dizzy or passing out. Doc says I’ve been getting extra heartbeats sometimes. Low blood pressure has been a problem too.
When I pass out from low blood pressure, the first thing is I get super dizzy. Then a ringing in my ears so loud I can’t hear anything. Then my vision closes in and turns red and I wake up on the floor.
Thanks for sharing!
Interesting, that’s my experience with anesthesia.
Gsus4Probably, yes. Imagine how superhuman you’d feel skydiving without a parachute outside the day of your death. (plot twist: you spend 10 years in a coma afterwards and still die of it :/)
coma would be the universe being nice to you. Imagine a full body paralysis where you’re aware of every second passing and the only thing you can do is rot, and maybe hope twitter’s head clown puts a dodgy chip in your brain so maybe you could feel the joy of playing solitaire again.
Ok, you’re winning at monkey pawing :D lemme see if I can top that…
CommunistBear [he/him]Yeah, I’d go for it. I already know that it’s inevitable. Being able to not fuck over my loved ones by having certain things in order would make things easier for them.
Can I change it?
I got a scan that detected cancer which I was later able to get removed. That cancer would have probably killed me in five years.
If I get told that I’ll die of cancer in twenty years, I’m going to deal with it in ten years.
Of course I would, then I would hate myself for it. But I know I’d hate myself even more if I had the chance to know and not take it
Definitely. If I'm gonna die in the near future it'd make no sense to continue university.
owenfromcanadaAbsolutely. Making sure I have a huge life insurance policy, but getting it far ahead enough to avoid questions of fraud would be worth it.
QuarterSwedeNo. I already live to help people and continue making connections. Wouldn’t change a thing.
It’s truly a great thing if Death is unable to change your priorities. You got your shit figured out and must pat yourself on your back.
I learned some lessons from elders a long time ago that the one thing they wished they had done differently is spend more time with family and friends. Helping someone is an extension of that and truly makes me happy. Nothing else gives as much meaning.
I don’t know bruh, I’m depressed enough already.
Call me Lenny/LeniYes so I can prepare.
It’s do this.
Leeeerooooooyyyyyyy. nnnn’Jennnnnnkinsssssssss
A lot of people definitely would take it. This might be the time to confess their love to a lifelong crush, punch their bully in the face, save up and complete their bucket lists, etc.
Sure it would help me adjust the plan
Is that a knife you’re holding behind you?
I think just the fact that the answer could be something like: “2 more years, suicide” is a no-go for me. I’m not a suicidal person so hearing something like this would absolutely fucking terrify me. I think the more time I’d have left the more freaked out I’d get, constantly wonder when will it start? When will the hell that pushes me to take my own life begin?
pixeltreeI mean, on the bright side, only two more years until I can kill myself!
Yes. I think it would add more value to the time I have now and would help me best prepare for my passing.
I think it would make me procrastinate worse, then become apathetic at the end because “I only have X time left …”
For sure. Though you can never really know. I look at death statics for my age and area every once in a while to adjust my risk taking or too see what health concerns I should be prepping for.
Knowledge is half the battle and all
If I knew the reason, chances are it would show “tried to cheat death” with a very close death time. I’d better off not knowing it; because I would definetly try to cheat against it. My lack of knowledge about it will let me live longer.
That’s be nice. I could make arrangements early and adjust my life insurance to maximize payout with minimum payments. It’d also be good to know the how so I can be sure not to be home when it happens - or at least wear a diaper so I don’t poop all over the sofa.
Is it absolutely certain and nothing I can do to change it?
If so fuck yes I’m pretty much immortal tell that date.
oh just because you know when you’ll die doesn’t mean you can go yolo on everything. Getting into a horrific accident and becoming bed ridden for the rest of your life doesn’t count as dying. Imagine laying in bed, body paralysed, knowing that this is the place you’ll spend 30 years in.
You’d still be need to be as careful as usual, just with a painful awareness of how many seconds you have left until the end, and with a curse of not being able to go on your own terms if something terrible happens.
YOLOO!!!.. WAIT, fuck your right. I reject my claim and now will live in a box scared of existing.
explodicleYou could do fun stuff where if you die, you REALLY die, like testing new submarines.
DasusAnd what happens if you buy a literal ton of C4, cover yourself in the pile and detonate?
I have to survive somehow, right?
That relies on you being able to acquire this C4 without the authorities noticing and putting a stop to it.
C4 is the easiest for this example. I can definitely manage explosives. You can rather easily make things which blow up.
Let’s make this easier then, I go to the woods and set up a huge fucking boulder on an elaborate pulley system (don’t worry about me finding them, I live in Finland were boulders and rocky surfaces are a plenty. My cousins actually operate a gravel business, so they have lots of proper gear for breaking rocks into smaller rocks, and vehicles to do those things with. So let’s say there’s a pit. I lay a ton of harsh gravel on the bottom of it, a proper few meter layer. Then I take a loader full of massive boulders. And another. And a third one. Place them around the pit. Place myself in the pit, and remotely activate the loaders to drop all those boulders on me. Oh and I didn’t mention, but I put a bed in the pit with me. It’s a bed of extremely sharp knives, covered by a thin cardboard so I don’t get stabbed if I easy myself onto it. On top of that, there’ another bed, upside down, also loaded with insanely sharp swords. All of the boulders will fall into the pit, crushing the bed system, which stabs and slices me into pieces while the boulders to the rest of the work. (The bed frames are soft enough so that they can hold knives, but will be utterly deformed by the boulders so they won’t stay in the way.
Then I’ve also paid for a crazy cousin to empty both barrels of a shotgun to my face with a full metal slug right as the stones start dropping.
But… I’ll survive?
This again assumes you can successfully pull this off. Get into an accident on your way to the woods and get paralyzed from the neck down? Too bad, you live now. Crazy cousin has a sudden moment of clarity, recognizes the insanity of what you’re doing, then has you committed to an asylum? Too bad, you live. Spend a few hours toiling to set up your contraption, collapse in a puddle of exhaustion, then have a change of heart because why the duck are you putting so much work into trying to off yourself? Well, then you live.
Paralysed from the neck down.
Then how am I gonna run the marathon?
So you’re saying you have no free will whatsoever, but despite whatever happens, the prophecy will be true?
That I could never drive an older car pretty much, because it’s easy to kill yourself with one. Much less a motorbike without a helmet.
I can never hold anything sharp which could cut the jugular. Couldn’t manage to go swimming, because diving deep and inhaling would somehow have to fail?
Either the prediction is bullshit, oooor it gives you magical plot armor (unless it’s extremely vague, but that goes against OP’s description),
I don’t think you understand how hypotheticals work. When someone says “suppose X happens”, it doesn’t means X can or will happen. They’re asking you to imagine a scenario where it does happen. How the rules of the universe changes to allow it to happen can be up to you, and there’s many ways that you do it, but some will lead to more interesting thought experiments than others. You proposed a rule change where knowing when/how you die with absolute certainty means being immune to all harm until that point. I don’t think that’s a very interesting scenario to think about, so I proposed an alternative that is closer to how our universe actually world and can simply be explained by very good (or bad, depending on perspective) luck.
I don’t think you understand how posting hypotheticals on forums works; they get elaborated and “tested” by asking questions or positing premises. Thought experiments, as you seem to be aware of the term at least.
OP used the word exactly.
That means you have exact knowledge of it.
Of course having exact foreknowledge of such a thing would affect your life. Would that effect then affect the thing being the exact time and date? If not, then it’s utter gibberish, because by telling you about it, they’ve already changed history and thus it won’t apply anymore.
If however it won’t affect it, then you’ve gained immortality. You could play Russian roulette as much as you want and never have to fear dying. You can perhaps argue that maybe you survive a shot, but how would that be possible from a large calibre revolver aimed directly at the brainstem?
miraculous survival? world’s first talking head? depends on the exact wording and if you got your intro from a benevolent fairy or a genie
So a magical but injured life is possible, but a magical but non-injured one isn’t?
Cool.
Plot twist. Going YOLO for this reason is exactly what starts the chain of events leading to your expiration.
No. None of the other 100+ billion people had that knowledge, I don’t want to be the only one.
If it’s possible for you then it was likely possible for a lot of them too
I would 100% exploit this (insurance for family).
No, I don’t want to see my expiration date every single time I close my eyes. That would just ruin whatever time I have left because that’s all I would ever think about.
I think you’d get over that. I don’t think it’d be any worse than normally contemplation of mortality, eventually. There’d be the initial shock, and then again as it nears, but I think it’s worth it to know.
You and I clearly work differently
Sure. It would make planning for retirement a lot easier; I’d have a pretty good idea of how much I needed to save and invest.
Yes. Be able to choose the right life insurance plan, investments, etc for my beneficiaries.
Also for deciding when to retire or how much money you can/should spend too maximally enjoy your life.
Absolutely. Brushes with and actually facing death force people to see their life more purely, more actively and honestly. Why turn down that chance to live your life exactly as you’ve always known you wanted to because you can’t see it any other way? We all know this concept in our minds, but few, if any of us, actually live this way. When that time comes, a lot of us will have regrets for not living life more fully.