Time Travelers are Pricks

Before you hop in your Delorean, phone booth, wormhole, etc. and travel back to the past to change that thing you think ruined your life, let me ask you something: Are you really that selfish?

Sure, right now, you’re thinking about your own life. Maybe you’re thinking about going back and changing the outcome of a relationship. Or perhaps you’re obsessed about a job opportunity that you either lost or missed out on.

Or it could be spending more time with people you didn’t know at that time would soon be gone.

All of that is completely understandable. Who wouldn’t want to alter their fate if they’re unhappy with how things have turned out?

But in your self-obsession, you’ve lost sight of just how many variables you hold in your hand.

First, let’s just get this out of the way: Time travel is beyond complex.

Not only are you moving back in time, but you also have to make sure you’re landing in the right point in space that Earth floated in at that time. Because remember, you’re traveling from and landing on a moving object. You have to get the location right, or else you’ll probably just suddenly appear in and die in the vacuum of space sometime in the past.

I mean, hell, if you don’t shoot for an open field, you probably even run the risk of materializing halfway in a wall or stuck in a tree or some other ridiculous catastrophe.

But I’m sure you’ve thought about the very real physical dangers already. And yet, you’re still considering doing this.

Alright.

Let me try another tactic.

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So, let’s say you do this, and you’re successful.

You go back and you change that one thing, and then you come back to the present. Your life is amazing. Everything you did worked like a charm, and you are, in that moment, happy again.

What about everyone else?

Because no one is an island. Everything we do affects others to some degree.

How many people’s lives did you just ruin by undoing the circumstances that led to perhaps their greatest personal growth?

How many former addicts did you just put back under its thumb by erasing their triumphant escape from it?

Sure, you’ve thought about how your decision might affect your immediate friends and family. But you never really know how many lives your own truly impacts. You’ll never know the true extent of the shockwaves you pulse out into the world while you’re in it.

Changing your path would also warp countless others in some way.

I know how serious that sounds.

I really wish I could tell you that traveling back in time is a fun romp like Marty McFly trying not to have sex with his own mother, and that every person’s life that you’d change deserves to be a subservient shell of themselves like Biff Tannen.

But that’s not reality.

The reality is you are going to revert the lives, make the dreams come undone again and break the hearts of so many good, anonymous other human beings around you no matter how “careful” you try to be about it.

This will happen. It is an absolute certainty.

I suppose, at least, you could choose to take solace in the fact that no one else would ever know you did it.

I mean, for them, it will just have never happened.

They won’t have any memories of the other timeline. They won’t know what you’ve stripped from them. They won’t know that they’re re-running races they’ve already finished. They won’t know when they fail that you also have a memory of a world where they succeeded.

But you will.

You’ll have to decide if you can live with that.

Beyond that, can you live with yourself if you robbed someone — say, someone you love — of the better world they’ve found without you, instead of figuring out how to create a thriving world for yourself without them?

Because see, in the end, time travel comes down to being — at every level — a unilateral decision someone makes for themselves and an unknown set of other people without regard to the outcome of any life except their own.

It’s simply choosing the self over all.

Now that you know that and now that I’ve laid out the whole scope of what you’re thinking about doing, let me ask you one more time:

Are you really that selfish?