“If I could choose to live any life in world history I would choose to fight in the two deadliest wars ever. I’d survive both of course. For some reason i would also like to personally experience the Great Depression” yes I have been thinking about this for 5 years
Some interesting implications here. For one thing, unless his country is either hard up, disorganized, or both, he would probably not join at the age of 14. So chances are this fictional boy is something like Serbian, Russian, or Turkish. And the 20th century, well,
I was gonna but in this insane scenario the guy outlined, he died in the 80s (presumably helping a right wing paramilitary in South America) and therefore missed Desert Storm
love dudes like this, they spend all day as computer jockeys but they're convinced if they were just born into the right time they would somehow have been supersoldiers
Have kids during the great depression and have them live through a war.
He totally missed a massive pandemic. I had a great aunt that died of flu. My grandma had two siblings die from household fires in the 30s. The baby was given away bc they couldn't afford him. My Grandparents didn't go to HS.
Bonus, when my aunt died, her mother had a mental breakdown and had to be institutionalized for 40 years aaannnd my dad didn't know his grandmother was in an asylum. She outlived everyone in her immediate family.
yeah lol other than the “of course I’d not just survive the wars, but be left without physical or psychological damage” the omitting of the/his 30s is hilarious.
And veteran services didn't even have a nurse staff til a woman who'd been a WWI field hospital inspector was elected to House, got it in place. Rep Edith Nourse Rogers is part of why we have VA hospitals.
Even so military was used to violently clear a DC vet camp in early 30s 😳 Google "Bonus Army"
"Life expectancy for a man born in the U.S. in 1900 was 46, but I am confident that despite fighting in two wars--including one in my 40s, like the heartiest soldiers--I will die peacefully in my 80s, presumably from a massive cocaine overdose."
What are the odds of survival for this hypothetical individual, anyway? There's got to be a % chance based on the survival rates of the wars, the poverty, the diseases, etc.?
i mean, this is my grandfather, basically, except for the fact that he didn’t serve in wwii (married, had enough of that shit) & tho he was pretty successful, bore various psychological scars all his life
That's what I mean though, your grandfather (no disrespect) is not This Guy. The guy who was born in the year 1900, served in both wars and died sometime in the 1980's. Like what are the odds of surviving all of those things simultaneously?
It’s the war version of saying you wished you were born at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution so you could work in a bunch of different factories.
I'd simply fight in WWI and return a hero with two medals, half a face and no legs, die of substance abuse before the Great Depression hits and be bombed in my grave by the luftwafe
i would choose to be born in 1949. young enough to avoid WW2/korea; old enough to avoid vietnam; get to enjoy the fruits of one of the greatest economic booms in human history; and then right as i hit the prime of my career, i get to rig things so that nobody else can be as rich as me
My late father was born in 1939 but that economic boom was only in US
In Eastern Europe was rationing and communism
Also we ( I was teenager then) “enjoyed” Chernobyl and no one told you why lettuce is brown
Let's not forget the fact he's spending his childhood in a coal mine or a factory, but I'm sure he simply wouldn't get injured or develop long-term conditions from that either.
There was a push to regulate child labor around 1915-16.
One of the arguments against was...
states rights.
Florence Kelley was an early factory inspector in Illinois in 1890s, but it took uneven efforts at state levels for years before worker safety/more robust child labor laws were federal level
Federal level was largely due to Frances Perkins and her team while she was Sec of Labor, first woman on the cabinet.
Even so when they did a report in the 40s measuring progress 5 years after the labor law, there were still infractions - minors under like 15 working w/hazardous materials etc
The fun part is the mustard gas (& every other chemical agent they tried) just mostly crippled a bunch of people rather than killing them outright. Turns out chemical agents are really fucking useless.
Not really useless, a wounded person requires extra resources to try to recover and get them to rear areas. Not trying to recover survivors, the sounds of them screaming in agony or choking on their own lungs saps morale too.
I’d personally choose the Black Plague, which I’d survive, naturally, and then I’d get to enjoy the fun nursery rhyme about it as a traveling minstrel, which means I’d eat and sleep in a new palace every night.
If I had a time machine I would absolutely scoop him up, drop him in a trench at Passchendaele, and stick around exactly long enough to record his “OH SHIIIIIIIIII-“ for posterity
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
And the first one doesn't even have a "good" side. Literal pointless death for imperial ambition. Even though my grandfather fought the NAZIs, as righteous a war probably can be, he didn't talk about it for fourty years. It was not a good time.
My friend’s grandpa did actually fight in both those wars and survive, and he was so traumatized that it intensely blighted the rest of his long life. Anyway!
I can understand people in WWI or even WWII thinking warfare is full of honor & glory & God on your side when all you had were fictionalized accounts and newspaper propaganda, but to think this in the modern day surrounded by easy access live footage of the horrors of war is profoundly delusional.
people who lived through any ONE of those things were changed forever by them, as all the writing from those periods can attest, but homeboy here is just gonna sail right through everything, no problem
If you think MLK's call for a socialist redistribution of wealth owed to the African minority in the US for centuries of enslavement and disentitlement is the same as investing in an economic vehicle of complete and unbridled Ultra-Capitalism is the same you must be an idiot. Or a grifter.
Yes, you’re right, some addresses are controlled by ETF custodians that represent 100’s of thousands of shareholders with a bitcoin ETF position. Similarly they could be large exchange accounts again holding the bitcoin positions of 100’s of thousands of individuals.
Surving WWI wouldn't be so difficult, unless he was born in France or German. The problem is the age cut to be both 17 during WWI and bellow 35, 40 during WWII (Albert Speer was a kid during WWI). He would have to fight WWI as a teenager and as an officer(General?) in WWII.
my dad got it pretty much right—born in '34, too young for WW2, served in the navy on a carrier in between korea and vietnam, had a whole-ass career despite not having a college degree when you could raise a family on one salary
my dad hit the sweet spot too--born in '43, so missed Korea and Nam. My uncle, a few years younger almost went--he was a Marine Reserve and never went to Nam, but he was nearly called up a couple of times. My grandfather urged him to go to Canada.
I don't mean he was simply poor. He and his sister shared a room in a boardinghouse they could just barely afford after their two older sisters and parents all died of TB. They were just kids--not even 20 when that went down.
My grandfather and all of his brothers were given away to different orphanages in the Depression when they were little boys. Cool time to be alive though!
When I hear lush, silly instrumental music of the fifties, I think: if I’m a traumatized 30-something married vet who survived the Battle of the Bulge, I just want to sit in my chair with a drink and a smoke and ease the panic attacks with the Mantovani Strings.
what these dinguses don't get is that cherry picking the fun bits like fashion and music IS TOTALLY FINE! Just, you know...do that. It's a time honored tradition, even.
Not one of these guys has ever heard of the Muese-Argonne, Belleau Wood, the Bonus Army, Corregidor, Bataan, Kasserine Pass, etc. And good luck with your teeth, typhus, and every other disease we once corralled but now get another crack at surviving. They'd love Father Coughlin, tho.
The only good thing to come out of WWI was my great granddad's favorite joke about two friends who lost opposite arms in the war, opened a hardware store (insert list of the entire store's inventory here) and every winter they'd share a pair of gloves.
Absolutely! You just have to avoid the 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic, 1861-65 US typhoid epidemic, and 1863-75 Middle East cholera epidemic on your way to China.
Not sure of the dates but after most of the vaccines have been developed but in time to get a final salary pension and a house for less than 3x my annual wage
The move is to be born in 1935 or so.
You avoid WWII. Lots of people get killed there so you have less competition in the job market. You avoid the big wars. Make more money. Still young for sexual revolution. Gravy.
Yeah I have fought in zero wars but everyone I have ever talked to who has have all had the same opinion - that I am better off having been in zero wars than they are for having been in one. Pretty unanimous there.
on the other hand you can be friends with melancholic JRR Tolkien, and then outlast the man by a few years
this was an age where a boy named John who saw his mom, who was in her 30s, die of type 1 diabetes for insulin was not developed yet, and penicillin was not in uses till the 1930s
That was my grandfather's life. Served in the Canadian navy in WWI, watched family and friends die fighting Nazis in WWII. He saw cars, planes, radio, TV, talkies, jets, antibiotics, and atomic bombs come into use. I still have his mantlepiece clock, ticking nearby, and chiming every hour.
for me, fight in ww1, lose my hearing when a shell explodes and spend 1918 in a field hospital, catch the spanish flu as it makes its first rounds of the hospitals in 1918 then having survived in debilatated fashion search in vain for anyone that will hire a shellshocked and disease ridden veteran
I was thinking of fighting and living in the absolute worst places and times. Black in Mississippi was bad but Chinese or in Byelorussia from 1920-1950 was a whole another level of hell.
This reflects the thoughts of a very uneducated person.
Wanting to experience two world wars (with estimates of up to 20M deaths in WW1 and up to 80M in WW2) and 60M devastated by poverty during the depression.
🤦🤦
Bro chose one of the objectively worst periods in human history Christ on a stick.
Fight in WW1!? The fucking meatgrinder??? Does he have ANY idea about trench warfare?
Sleeping in mud and shit and blood and dead bodies, constant shelling for days, weeks, months, YEARS.
'I wouldn't die like those weak, pathetic 8.8 million men, 6 millions civilians in the Great War. I'm different! I live through every war and moment of mass death because I am so strong!'
"Fighting in the Great War" was nothing to desire. There were about 10 million military deaths and many, many wounded. Any soldier only hoped to survive that mechanized slaughter.
Seriously. Doesn’t even imagine that he might come back in some other part of the world in 1900 as the abandoned child of a prostitute, working as an errand boy in an opium den or a diamond mine before dying in his 20s.
My great grandfather fought in both wars and died in his 80s.
All those life experiences did a great job of preparing him for a life as a deeply broken alcholic gambler who was all but abandoned by his family because even in the 60s they knew he was too dangerous to be around.
Can’t imagine any scenario where “do trench warfare and live with PTSD 8 decades before anyone has a name for it” weighs into the best version of my life
Ohh, they had a name for it. Words to the effect of "Gross misconduct becoming a soldier" and it was a bullet to the head for anyone who didn't get their shit together the second a toff in a uniform motioned toward his Webley.
"Trump is right: All this "American Empire" stuff after World War 2 is worthless. Nothing but Chinese, Canadians and Europeans taking advantage of us. All those international laws, treaties and institutions came in to being for NO REASON."
Needless to say, this is pure idiocy and nonsense.
I always remember an old AV Club article where they asked the authors what era in history they’d want to visit. The lone female writer said, “no, thank you, now is the best it will get for me.” White guys are amazing.
I don't know how, maybe by magic, maybe by divine interervention, but I truly wish that he gets to experience this exactly as written, with the knowledge that it's what he asked for.
The assumption that he’d survive fighting in both world wars 😏 I have a great uncle who was born in 1900 - he turned 18, enlisted, got sent to Flanders and died in Sept … 2 mths before the war ended. I cannot find out what killed him - I just hope it wasn’t gas.
Took my parents here and it was hard to get over how they fought back and forth over the same piece of land, for so long, with so many lost lives. Such a waste.
Biggest takeaway for me was “You know how we stand in fields and shoot at each other? Well now, lets do that, but now with the most industrial killing machines the world has ever seen”
The part he's missing is "grow up in a family that's rich from slave labour in the 1800s, so any military position I get means I'll never be on the front lines and the great depression barely affects me."
If I could be born at any time in history it would be 1990 because then I'd be 5ish when Mario 64 came out. I feel like every 5ish-year-old needs to play Mario 64.
why is the depression on the list of cool things. like I understand the war part, like 85% of straight guys think dying in a war is cool, but the depression?
Joining the WPA, camaraderie building the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive and having cool dulcimer playing girl friends (or boy friends), drinking apple brandy, poaching bears.
I give Jason bonus points for doing it 9 months after Musk's nonsense about zero cases by April and for making some terrible leaps in logic to come up with his numbers, but that was a strong contender.
“Sometimes my grandfather would lose it and scream at us then sob and shake and have to go to bed. Grandma said it was coz of the war. I am so jealous of him!!!”
My grandfather tried to get his sons to dodge the draft but would not talk about what happened during the war until he wrote a bunch of funny little anecdotes in his 70s. Little jokes and bon mots that would just mention friends of his dying as a short aside.
"Ah yes, I think I'd like to get mustard gassed, not be allowed to drink, go broke, either see Nazi concentration camps firsthand or suffer through the horrors of a Japanese POW camp, then return home in time for Duck & Cover and McCarthyism, then I'd have Vietnam to look forward to."
My grandfather was born in 1900. Was at Ypres. Went to sea after the war, then worked on the design of the Hurricane in the 30s. He was a loving grandad, but my mum said he was a terrible father.
This man would get trench foot, breathe in mustard gas and get his head blown off because he didn’t crouch low enough in the trench. All within a week of joining the war effort
Peak Internet is people complaining about the very existence of the Internet while logged into the Internet. You can totally put your phone down and move away from your desk anytime you want.
If I could live in any period in history it would be 2400, when all this crap about society being organised around concentrating power has gone away, and we can finally get to work.
And also while I'm winning all these world wars, I spend time in Japan, becoming the greatest ninja and a master calligrapher with various waifus. And also I join a team of people with incredible superpowers, including a metal Russian who throws me. And also I have a healing factor and metal claws
My grandfather, born in 1900, joined the Royal Navy in 1914 as a boy sailor and served continuously on the same ship until 1945. So it is possible though rare
If he's born in 1900 he'd be 14 when the war broke out, I assume this is intentional and he specifically longs for the unique thrill of being a child soldier in one of the most traumatic wars in history
If he's a USAno, he wouldn't get in without a side trip to Canada or something like running away from home to be 14 in he war. This is someone who had both never seen combat but also has never seen street fighting.
The wild overconfidence of those that thought they could beat Serena Williams in a tennis match, here reformed as "I'd love to survive two world wars with sufficient appendages and trauma to then thoroughly enjoy the fun of the cold war."
That guy's is obviously an American who isn't particularly good at math, but if you lived in a country where someone could expect to see significant combat both as a teenage boy in WWI and middle aged man in WW2, the 20s weren't roaring in any way you'd want to be a part of.
I guess it might make sense if you were as young as possible in WWI and were a career officer by WWII but then you probably wouldn’t be living it up through the ‘20s
Among other things, being in your 60s in the 60s must have sucked. You’re broken and tired and the kids are all doing drugs and listening to rock music.
Imagine actually WANTING to throw yourself into the bloody gaping maw of WWI, knowing full well with the power of historical hindsight that you will rot from the feet up in freezing mud whilst the corpses of your friend hang from barbed wire above you, waiting to join them in abject terror.
What would actually happen is this person would survive two years of brutal trench warfare, including being mustard gassed a time or two, only to come home with shell shock and instantaneously die of the Spanish Flu
WWII draft pool was 18-45, so he could have fought in that.
But imagine fighting a war in your 40s. And depending on whether and when he had kids and what their genders were, he might have to worry about his 18-year-old son being drafted.
Yeah i would assume the guys in their 40s were probably mostly volunteers, career guys or officers. If somebody has stats on old guys actually getting drafted and sent over, that would be very interesting to see
In every war there have been kids who lied about their ages to get into the army, but they're the exception.
I assumed the OP was America - and in the US you had to be 21 to be drafted.. They evenentually lowered the draft age to 18 a mere three months before the war ended.
Our current events make a lot more sense when you realize the guys who are in charge of things in this country now actually think being criticized online is worse than voluntarily living through a Great Depression
Well, USA had less casualties than many other countries. So it is kind of possible? Especially if you were a private in WW1 and became an officer by the time of WW2. Doesn't make his post any less stupid, though.
How did he survive the Spanish Flu in 1918? It was deadliest for young adults, and if he was lucky enough to survive that, WWI would surely have finished off someone that dumb.
As a young man in the 1920s my grandad met a veteran whose lungs filled up daily with green fluid; after a week of bad days the poor man wanted to kill himself. A fact he was happy to relate to a random 18 year old doing some surveying in his village.
one total accident, stupid twist of fate, and you suddenly need to be a pre-Olympian capable of surviving on raw leeks and splinting your own bleeding limbs for 21 days in unfamiliar terrain.
"i would prefer to die after spending my life traumatized by the industrialized horrors of mechanized genocide justifiably believing any given moment could be humanity's last due to incoming nuclear war that obliterates all multicellular life as we know it"
1900? Ok, roll a d10.
3?
Ooof, sorry you don'tmake it to adulthood. But roll percentile dice to see which of these childhood ailments and dangers you succumed to...
The first half is too easy to pick on, so I wanna shout out the second half. Yeah, live through race riots and the Vietnam War, the country almost coming unglued in 1968 near the end of your life, and finally being old and retired in an economy marked by stagflation and oil crises??? Good luck!
Also, fighting the war against segregation and racism on the side of segregation and racism, and fighting the war against sexism on the side of sexism.
Not saying *all* white seniors in the 60s and 70s were like that, but history generally doesn’t look kindly upon that demographic.
Comments
the joys of American wartime cuisine, and after
your wife can't have her own credit card or bank account & you lived through more Jim Crow than not but hey, not your problem
He totally missed a massive pandemic. I had a great aunt that died of flu. My grandma had two siblings die from household fires in the 30s. The baby was given away bc they couldn't afford him. My Grandparents didn't go to HS.
The past! It was bad!
Even so military was used to violently clear a DC vet camp in early 30s 😳 Google "Bonus Army"
In Eastern Europe was rationing and communism
Also we ( I was teenager then) “enjoyed” Chernobyl and no one told you why lettuce is brown
One of the arguments against was...
states rights.
Florence Kelley was an early factory inspector in Illinois in 1890s, but it took uneven efforts at state levels for years before worker safety/more robust child labor laws were federal level
Even so when they did a report in the 40s measuring progress 5 years after the labor law, there were still infractions - minors under like 15 working w/hazardous materials etc
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
Interesting.
Bro just walk away from the screen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart
If you think MLK's call for a socialist redistribution of wealth owed to the African minority in the US for centuries of enslavement and disentitlement is the same as investing in an economic vehicle of complete and unbridled Ultra-Capitalism is the same you must be an idiot. Or a grifter.
These are two fundamentally different things, which one is it?
lol.
food safety a bit of a problem for a while there
also the women and the Black folk not to mention Teh Gheys not living their best lives mostly but fuck 'em amirite
godsake
He was, in fact, not fine.
but awesome take, my good dude (OP, not you).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_plague_pandemic
- Pindar
for a white dude!
You avoid WWII. Lots of people get killed there so you have less competition in the job market. You avoid the big wars. Make more money. Still young for sexual revolution. Gravy.
this was an age where a boy named John who saw his mom, who was in her 30s, die of type 1 diabetes for insulin was not developed yet, and penicillin was not in uses till the 1930s
Then he's fighting WWII with 40-something knees. If he had a son, his kid might be fighting over there too.
Wanting to experience two world wars (with estimates of up to 20M deaths in WW1 and up to 80M in WW2) and 60M devastated by poverty during the depression.
🤦🤦
Fight in WW1!? The fucking meatgrinder??? Does he have ANY idea about trench warfare?
Sleeping in mud and shit and blood and dead bodies, constant shelling for days, weeks, months, YEARS.
And to add, I find it silly for Casey to think he'd survive either WWI or WWII, let alone both.
All those life experiences did a great job of preparing him for a life as a deeply broken alcholic gambler who was all but abandoned by his family because even in the 60s they knew he was too dangerous to be around.
He also didn't say anything about Spanish Flu...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM
Shell Shock = Battle Fatigue = Operational Exhaustion = PTSD
Needless to say, this is pure idiocy and nonsense.
I’m begging these mfs to quit fetishizing the worst parts of human history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douaumont_Ossuary
What is wrong with this person?
I think he's far more evil than stupid.
But I wouldn't have made it out of the 60s.
His entire career was made online; he was a high school dropout doing kitchen work before he got famous for his online media content
Is he superman?
But of course they were career soldiers, including in peacetime. They did not re-enlist specifically for WW2.
Mustard gas! I’ll be retiring in the 60s!!”
C1 corvette.
Reality: Last surviving member of a family of 12 who manages a collective farm in Serbia and drinks himself to sleep every night.
And yes, the greatest generation would've also been loud and annoying about the shit they had to deal with if they had this void to scream into
Dipshit gonna dipshit 🤷♂️
But imagine fighting a war in your 40s. And depending on whether and when he had kids and what their genders were, he might have to worry about his 18-year-old son being drafted.
Then again, if you picked a birth year so you could fight, I assume you'd be volunteering.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29934965
I assumed the OP was America - and in the US you had to be 21 to be drafted.. They evenentually lowered the draft age to 18 a mere three months before the war ended.
Quick Google search got this:
"officer casualties as a percent of total US Army casualties by war:
WW I 6.6
WW II 10.4
WW II (less USAAF) 6.1
Korean War 5.0
Vietnam (killed only) 10.9"
https://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000069.html
Here is a note showing two british analysis of their loss rates. In all scenarios officers loss rate is higher then other ranks.
https://dupuyinstitute.org/2018/03/26/evetts-rates-british-war-office-wastage-tables/
one total accident, stupid twist of fate, and you suddenly need to be a pre-Olympian capable of surviving on raw leeks and splinting your own bleeding limbs for 21 days in unfamiliar terrain.
and this is THIS YEAR https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-found-alive-after-missing-3-weeks-california/story?id=121888546
hot take but ok
3?
Ooof, sorry you don'tmake it to adulthood. But roll percentile dice to see which of these childhood ailments and dangers you succumed to...
Not saying *all* white seniors in the 60s and 70s were like that, but history generally doesn’t look kindly upon that demographic.