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juicelandtoday at 1:17 AM1 replyview on HN

>with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time.

The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.


Replies

tpmoneytoday at 2:08 AM

It's a necessary restriction. Part of what drives modern anxiety is you don't know the future, so it's necessary that while you get to pick a time period where you have perfect visibility into its future (for example, you know that the cold war doesn't lead to the nuclear apocalypse) the person who lives through that moment can't have that knowledge. If you picked the cold war period, it is necessary that you pick it knowing your cold war self would NOT know that, and would be as anxious as their time and circumstances would make them with the information they would have had then, not the perfect* information you have now.