3 and 4 by a mile, are you kidding? Everyone picking 2 doesn’t lay awake at night cringing at past memories.
I was wavering between 1-3 and 1-4 but
Languages are a SKILL THAT CAN BE PRACTICED!
2 and 6, so I can still get a good night’s sleep after 8 straight hours of cringing.
Agreed. And 3 allows you to gain 1 too.
6 basically increases your lifespan by a 1/3. So if you would have normally lived to 75 you get to 100.
Sounds like it would make things like surgery with general anesthesia impossible though.
Edit: Now that I think about it, wouldn’t 4 be better since it makes you functionally immortal? Dying from old age just means dying due to some of those health conditions (heart disease, cancer etc.) that get more and more likely the older you get. If you can’t get those, you don’t die of old age.
Perfect health means you’ll be immortal. Combined with being talented you can do anything you want
Felt like perfect health was just like you’re never sick, never get a cavity, yada yada as these are all kind of lowkey powers
Yeah I agree that immortal probably isn’t accurate in my opinion. It depends on how liberal you interpret the term “healthy”. Is a stab wound bad health? Is decapitation bad health? I’d argue no, but there is a (weak imo) argument that it is.
A stab wound on good health heals better than a stab wound on bad health. Any injuries short of death is still better in a healthy body. I would not want a scratch on a diabetic body. And even if immortality is not on the table, severe chronic illness makes aging disgraceful.
I don’t disagree, but my point was a stab wound on a “healthy” versus “unhealthy” body is still a stab wound. If you’re able to be injured, the only way you’d be immortal is if you can regenerate from anything. That wasn’t part of the “perfect health”, so I’m assuming “perfect health” is not immortality like some of the others suggested.
Agree too. Perfect health isn’t immortality.
More than that. If time stops around you, you can sleep in every day. You’ll probably get more than 8 hours each night. Plus your stress will go down, and your health will go up. Both leading to a longer life. If you even used a small portion of your normal sleeping time toward physical activity, you could get very healthy.
Everyone skipping 4 is either young, or never had to deal with health problems.
- I assure all of you, that is the most OP of all the options.
Never get sick, no cancer, no aches, no heart disease, no Alzheimer’s, etc…
picks 4 and 6
gets hit by a train
the universe stops
No, I just don’t want any more of this than I already have.
Hands down, without a 2nd thought.
- Natural Skills
- Perfect Health
Yeah that was my thought too. For a second I was tempted with omnilingual, but then I realised that with natural skills I just learn whatever language I wanted with hardly any effort. Plus like, everything else.
My thoughts as well. Telekinesis seems cool but 3 & 4 are a perfect combo to a great life.
3 & 4 Gang! But seriously these two seems to heavily outweigh the others in combination. While not immediately OP the long term potential is pretty insane.
I feel like those two are absolutely great for life, right? I’d take those over telekinesis any day. It’s the same genre as being happy to get socks for Christmas as an adult somehow.
#4 is enough. Taking #3 is an extra treat.
So, right off the bat let’s just assume there are no “monkey’s paw” style downsides to these for this discussion.
Perfect memory mostly encompasses omnilingual because you’d only need to learn every word and rule one time and know it forever. Perfect memory also encompasses natural talent because muscle memory is a form of memory as well so all mental and physical skills would be incredibly easy to learn. No monkey’s paw: You don’t get bad memories forever stuck in the front of your consciousness.
The only upside omnilingual has over perfect recall is knowing dead languages no one else does.
The only upside for natural talent is that it probably makes you get stronger quicker. Gaining muscles is not a matter of remembering.
Perfect health is tempting because you’d live a long life without concerns of problems. No monkey’s paw: You can still die of old age or decide to end our own life. Let’s also say you can’t just skip sleep or skip eating and be fine. You still have to do the bare minimum to take care of yourself, you’re basically not a zombie (how they seem to just live forever).
Always having exact change is essentially infinite money. It’s fair to assume that for purchases where enough physical money couldn’t fit in your pocket that you’d get something like a prepaid debit card with the money you’d need. Even for things that you don’t pay with from your pocket (like buying a house) you could still go to the bank and fill out a slip saying you’re depositing a million dollars and get the money in your pocket to do so. Then wire the money over once it clears.
For time pausing whole you’re asleep, I’m going to interpret this as the ability to get rest without wasting your time. So essentially you don’t need to sleep. You still need to but for whatever reason you get the time back. So you still would need to take some time to find a bed and fall asleep but that’s still about a full 7 extra hours every day. Assuming you sleep 8 hours and are awake 16 you’re missing a third of your life. Sure, there isn’t as much to do when everyone is asleep but that’s still a nice effective extension to your life. No monkey’s paw: you aren’t stuck in some frozen time world forever the first time you sleep lol.
An interesting conundrum is picking between the free sleep and perfect health pills. If you’re already pretty healthy and have a low risk factor for diseases that affect quality of life but not the length of your life you may want to consider the perfect sleep power because it is going to roughly double your time.
Telekinesis is a curve ball. Saying it is only as strong as you are I will interpret it as meaning it is basically just another muscle and you can wear yourself out doing it. It’s cool but given those limitations I personally don’t find it worth it.
The tasty love pill is basically the opt out choice. It doesn’t do anything other than give you a one-time unique experience. I’m treating it as a none of the above.
So really it comes down to these:
- Omnilingual: if you specifically want to know dead languages no one knows (an extremely niche situation that might fascinate some anthropologists)
- Perfect memory: Effectively being able to learn to do anything new (including physical tasks) super quick while also memorizing anything instantly.
- Natural talent: you specifically want to gain muscles quick but don’t care as much about perfect memory.
- Perfect health: Better than free sleep for most people. Ensures you live aong and high quality life.
- Exact change: It’s just infinite money.
- Free sleep: Better for folks who are already healthy and don’t have many risk factors since it will roughly double your time you get to spend doing things.
- Telekinesis: A cool little power for the folks who are otherwise satisfied with their current abilities, life, and money. 8: Yummy love: A meme answer.
A lot of this can be summarized to,
- Do you want to be really good at things?
- Do you want to have a higher quality of life for longer?
- Do you want to be hyper rich?
Personally I think I’d want to really good at things. Specifically number 3, natural talent. I think being able to easily get fit would outweigh the benefits of having a truly perfect memory. Also there’s a lot of skills that just require raw discipline and not any sort of memory. I think I could get a lot of the benefits of perfect health by becoming more disciplined. I think this a great well rounded choice.
Infinite money is very tempting but also an incredible burden. Suddenly every problem you see becomes one you could solve if you just gave the money. It would give me a lot of guilt.
I’d watse my time I could be sleeping just doing stupid stuff. Perfect health is tempting though.
I think you’re overselling Perfect Memory a fair bit here. Just because you can perfectly recall something you’ve seen, doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to use it. E.g. just because you’ve memorised a manual on working a forklift, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly qualified to work as a forklift operator.
Languages, especially non-Latin based languages, require a whole different way of thinking about things that you won’t get from pure memory.
I disagree about the natural talent one. From my perspective thats the obvious first pick. At work I’m currently training to be a Crane Operator and struggle busing hard with it. Like yeah I could use it to get muscles but thats not even where I first went just because imo the ability to quickly learn a new skill is invaluable. imagine being a natural at negotiating business dealings to get a favorable outcome for your side. once you figure out how to turn your natural talent into money a lot of the other things will be able to fall into place.
damn now i feel stupid for quickly weighing out the pros of each and deciding when you wrote this whole essay studying the exact pros and cons of each and how useful they would be in everyday life, then simplifying the list down
I disagree about the natural talent one. From my perspective thats the obvious first pick. At work I’m currently training to be a Crane Operator and struggle busing hard with it. Like yeah I could use it to get muscles but thats not even where I first went just because imo the ability to quickly learn a new skill is invaluable. imagine being a natural at negotiating business dealings to get a favorable outcome for your side. once you figure out how to turn your natural talent into money a lot of the other things will be able to fall into place.
3 and 4. Perfect health is a no brainer and lets you enjoy life for way longer. And the natural talent one would let you easily learn the skills to come close to perfect memory and to know every language, giving you the benefits of 1 and 2 as well.
Perfect health seems kinds suss. That pill looking like a cigarette
Wait so 5. gives me effectively infinite money?
I know right? You show up and be like “One mansion, please” and the realtor says something like “sure, our cheapest one is $2M”.
So you reach into your pocket and out comes the exact change of $2m! Bust is it
No; not infinite.
Limitless yes, but it is limited by the fact that it only fills your pocket when you’re expected to pay for something. Therefore you’d be inconvenienced by anything that does not expect you to pay up front cash for a thing, and you’d need someone to tell you the exact amount you need to pay them to cause the pocket to generate the cash as well as the amount would be limited by the size of your pocket(s) and/or purse(s) for containing money.
Despite that you could definitely live “comfortably”.
ETA: My picks are 3 & 4.
-
Open a new checking account with a debit card
-
The account is always at a $0.01 balance
-
Keep this card in its own specific pocket
Now anytime you go to buy something, the exact amount will be deposited into the account and immediately withdrawn for said purchase.
Congratulations, literally everything costs a single penny.
Implement the selling of items, the transfers to alternate accounts, etc., and you can create infinite money.
-
Let’s do some fun math!
If we assume you always have a dollar in your pocket and that it takes around 3 seconds to grab them from your pocket.
For one year (8766 hours or 31,557,600 seconds) you will have 10,519,200 dollars. Assuming you don’t stop while eating for example and also you don’t sleep.
Elon Musk’s net worth is around 250 billion dollars (250,000,000,000). You will need 23,766 years of non-stop pulling bills to reach him.
Thats not how it was said. It said you had the exact change anytime. So If you buy something for 4 mill you get 4mill. If you buy sum for 1.59 you get that
I choose 4 and 7.
- 1: This is genuinely a blurse; you really don’t want to understand everything everyone ever says.
- 2: This is genuinely a curse; You will remember every little thing that happens to you and it will haunt you forevermore.
- 3: This is mostly useless and will lead to you being exploited.
- 4: This is very good.
- 5: This is worthless; unless this acts like an infinite money glitch.
- 6: This is highly dangerous. You’d better not fall into a coma; nobody would be able to help you.
- 7: This is good; and it would be mostly useful; even if you were required to keep it a secret from everyone.
- 8: This is absolutely the most useless one yet. Eh, at least it’s probably harmless.
If you take 4, is 6 still dangerous?
How is 3 useless? If you want to do a profession or skillful activity you just need to warm up a bit and you’ll excel. You can write amazing stories, be a 5 star chef, learn any language and make option 1 redundant, you can do anything a single person can accomplish.
I’d say 3&4 are the prime combo. Succeed at whatever you want to do and be in perfect health the whole time
2: This is genuinely a curse; You will remember every little thing that happens to you and it will haunt you forevermore.
Wouldn’t perfect memory recall just let you recall memories, not necessarily be forced to recall them? Whether or not you chose to do it or it haunts you seems more like a matter of mental health…
You can’t always control memory recall; even in perfect health.
Similarly you can’t always control events around you, nor can you control things that you may do and later come to regret. All of these small things will add up cumulatively over time. Perfect recall is a shortcut to mental health problems.
Totally agree, I have a good memory for some things and sometimes it already feels like a curse, I would never wish a perfect memory on anyone.
Perhaps you are right, but wouldn’t the perfect health pill help with that?
- When you die, you remain unconscious indefinitely. The outside universe remains paused as your protons decay. Unfathomable amounts of time pass only for your body. Eventually, a Boltzmann brain that matches you arises. Time unpauses and the energy this microcosm contained is released into your neighborhood.
6 very much depends on interpretation. I think yours is overly negative - the net benefits are considerable! So much so that I picked 4&6 even before I noticed that 4 averts 6’s issue.
I’d need a lawyer.
Does perfect health last forever? No brainer then. Definitely don’t take the time pauses when you sleep /are unconscious without perfect health though, because then no one could perform surgery on you that requires general anesthesia, which could cause problems.
And arguably, being sleep deprived is not being in perfect health, so if you take perfect health you might not ever need to sleep again anyway, depending on the fine print.
And how precise is the telekinesis? Does it work on things like liquids and gasses? Could you use it to separate liquids and gasses according to type, for instance? If so it’d be more than just fun, it could be quite valuable for sciencey stuff, and you could probably make bank separating out things that are quite hard to isolate. And even if not, you might have a good career in hazardous material handling, and or manipulation of things through clean room windows.
The infinite money trick is also incredibly tempting. Does it work on things like houses and boats? Is it legal? Would you have sufficient proof of its legitimacy that if you, say, pulled a couple hundred grand out of your pocket to buy a house that the sellers would trust that it’s real and above board even if it were?
And so on. Temptation is health and telekinesis, but the various details might cause money to win out over telekinesis.
Maybe natural talent health, but I’d have to plan out what talents to acquire first, as well as information on degree. If with slight work you could become the optimal physicist etc, to the point where you could sit down and just write a perfect theory of everything that matched all our observations on paper, then that would of course be awesome. But if it doesn’t come with essentially super skills - well, I’m pretty ok with what I can do/how well I can learn now, and telekinesis sounds fun.
This is very well thought out.
And how precise is the telekinesis?
Also what range. Could you remotely rear naked choke anyone in the world, or just apply a leg press of a couple hundred pounds to their brain stem or some shit? Punch world leaders in the nuts at will? Crash planes by fucking with flight controls? Deorbit satellites? Divert asteroids into earth’s path?
Also, could you double jump or straight fly with it?
Manipulate roulette balls for quick money or meddle in sporting events you bet on (just telekinetically stuffing basketball shots and putt attempts and shit would be hilarious). Seems like telekinesis would be amazing.
I’m assuming that #5 is limited by the space in your pockets/purse and would only trigger if and only if you owe a debt on something to someone within your visual range. Additionally they would need to speak to you verbally what exact amount you need to trigger the pocket filling.
Thus; you could not likely pull out amounts even exceeding a few hundred thousand without some really clever planning.
I’m also assuming you will never simply pull a check out of your pocket, this superpower is CASH ONLY, which burdens you with the advantages and disadvantages of cash.
But like, if you never hand over the cash, don’t you still owe them the money, and then you just repeat until want? You could arbitrate or even actually owe a great debt in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, roll up in some cargo shorts, and then just effectively print money double fisting your shorts.
only trigger if and only if you owe a debt on something to someone within your visual range.
It would seem you didn’t understand my message.
No; you could not exploit it in this way. If you do not intend to pay a person then you do not need the money and have no debt you are seeking to pay. The generated cash would simply vanish from your pocket.
That cash is leaving your pocket one way or another; either by willing to pay somebody and actually doing it or it vanishing.
if you, say, pulled a couple hundred grand out of your pocket to buy a house that the sellers would trust that it’s real and above board even if it were?
Well it says exact “change” so I think yes if you dumped a few hundred thousand $1 coins out of your pocket when it’s time to pay they’ll think it’s sus lol
I suppose though if they refuse it you’ve already generated it and can scoop it up into a wheel barrow and see if a bank will take it. They may not care about the coins too much but they’ll definitely be reporting a guy bringing in a few hundred thousand dollars in coins every now and again to the IRS.
Pay your taxes on it and no problem.
2 and 4 are the most OP. Easy decision.
Perfect health is a no brainer. Not just the longer life but also live free from all the problems that come with health issues.
The second, not so much. Talent sounds good but can potentially make a very boring life. Telekinesis sounds good too but I think I’d still go with the time pause as that’s effectively a 50% life increase. Imagine a day where you can devote 12 hours to work and chores and another 12 to social and personal? You then have perfect health which means you can achieve peak performance in pretty much any sport.
All fun and games untill it’s the year 200000023, all of humanity is long dead, earth has been destroyed and you’re trapped in the white star that once was our sun. Unable to die, unable to move, unable to even lose your mind.
You are still in perfect health.
I didn’t interprete perfect health as immortality in this case. Just a long life until I died of a very old age.
Perfect mental health means you can handle the isolation and boredom, though. With natural talent you could become skilled at imagining yourself not being trapped in a gravity well.
My first thought was, #6 sounds great, but without perfect health, it could be a death sentence, since if you pass out from a health problem, noone will ever come to save you.
Now I have bigger questions. Does time resume when you die? Or is picking that one dooming the rest of the world to be paused forever?
Since death isn’t the same as sleep, I’d assume so.
1 and 4! I can visit any country, heck, any world and never get sick
i would say 4 and 7. 6 seems useful at first but what if you need surgery?
Local anasthetic?
First off, anyone who doesn’t say 2 is wasting this gift. Perfect memory and recall makes most of these other things easy.
Secondly, I’d choose Telekinesis just to fuck with people and win bar bets. Perfect memory would make it easy to make money, which would make perfect health much more attainable.
Nah, 2 is a curse. Everybody else doesn’t remember. But they think they do. You have to either repeat everything (since you do remenber the 1st/2nd/…) or you have to argue someone that’s wrongly remembering.
2 is a medical condition, there is people that remembers everything they did in their life.
You can ask them what they did in September 25th 2006 and they will tell you exactly what they ate for breakfast, what was the weather like, what they did, what day of the week it was …
From what I remember it was more a curse then a blessing. One because it’s really hard for them to categorize information and then they ever vividly everything including the bad stuff.
I’ll add an anecdote from a guy I know.
For one thing, he said the way his worked was that he’d take a mental picture and be able to recall that thing perfectly. So, you could flash (a couple of seconds) him a random page from War and Peace, and he could read it out to you.
However: he didn’t automatically know everything on the page. If he wanted to know what out said, he’d still have to take the time to read the page (in his memory).
And there was a downside: if he learned something incorrectly, he couldn’t unlearn it. It made things really difficult for him when his friends started getting married and changing their last names… or when people changed their phone numbers, or email addresses. In the latter cases, people he’d known for years who’d had 7 or 8 phone numbers, when he wanted to call them he’d have to mentally work through each number until he got to the last one before he could dial.
He never gave me a strong opinion about whether he was glad to have perfect recall, but he seemed to complain about it more than being grateful for it.
I wouldn’t say that I have “perfect recall” or even an “identical memory”, but I have an uncannily sharp memory.
I forget a lot, like most people, but what I remember is burnt into my mind. A lot of it are things I don’t want to remember. But, oh boy, can I tell you facts about giraffes!
It’s not “identical” memory, it’s eidetic memory.
Clearly I don’t have it, but thanks for the edification
