First entry...
I'm 2/3 done with my life. I'm aware that there are worse lives out there...more tragic lives, really awful lives...but that doesn't seem to make me any happier about my life. The whole "it could be worse" philosophy keeps me going but doesn't really make me feel better.
I've been a computer gamer for the second third. In most games, there is a system in place where you are allowed to save your progress at any point so that you can reload to that point in case you die or otherwise mess up. Some games are even designed so that you are expected to mess up...or even die...to learn how you are supposed to proceed.
I know most people have regrets and we rarely get "do overs" like in gaming, but what if we did get to save, try something difficult, fail, reload, and try again with more knowledge and experience than the first time? If we had this option in life it would probably make us much more casual about things knowing that if we mess up we could always reload. Or, like Bill Murray in the terrific film "Groundhog Day", we might continually reload until we felt we got it just right. On a cynical note, what if he got to the end of the story and his path toward perfection (getting the woman of his dreams) turned out to be wasted? What if the woman of his dreams turned out to be redoing her Punxsutawney plot until she arrived at a different result? The story works only because he has the magical ability to redo and no one else does.
If there was this universal ability to redo, there would probably be religious groups founded on the principle of just living life in one shot and not redoing things at all. The excitement of the unknown "what's around the next corner?" would be gone, so I could understand how some would reject the redo.
So, instead of everyone having the ability to redo, there would have to be some sort of limiting factor. There could be a limited number of redos. There could be a random number...sometimes getting only one and other times getting several. There could be a cost for redoing...say you lose something in exchange for each redo. I think we can all agree that the best limiting factor would be that only I have the redo ability...making it my superpower. Get your own superpower! I'm Redo Man!
