The Reverse Alternative Life Meme

[jeremy_m]

Here's a game you can play at home: keep your actual date of birth but project your life from there backwards instead of forwards, thinking how you'd have been affected by the different background. It's surprising how close history is to your life, at least if you're old.

Comments

[the_moon_faery]

Interesting to read, it's quite odd thinking through how a person would cope/thrive in different decades like that, with different opportunities and limitations...

[nusbacher]

It seems awfully unlikely you'd have survived both world wars without at least losing a limb.

[pogodragon]

My grandad managed it, he fought in both wars and still had all his limbs when he died in the mid-1980s aged almost 90. He wasn't an officer or anything tidy behind the lines, he was front line in WWI and somewhat less than front line in the second, though he was - obviously - a lot older then.

[jeremy_m]

I was assuming dead from the first war (hence dropping out of my own autobiography at that point), though as a middle aged South Welshy of the time I'd almost certainly have been in a coal or steel reserved occupation rather than the front line. Which has its own moral problems, since in a total war it's very hard to find anything to do that doesn't support that war, whether you approve of it or not.

Even in the forward timeline, when I was looking for a non-military job in the 1980s someone pointed out that the army uses nuts and bolts - in a complex economy nearly everything is military at some level of indirection.

[dru_marland]

As I started from pretty much the same point as you, you fortunately did the maths for me. Hey, I might have got to fly a Spitfire after all! -and sat around worrying about whether to go to Spain to fight for the Republicans and so on. Except the Spitfire experience would probably have got me. It's confusing, this living backwards lark. Remember Merlin, in TOAFK? -always getting into a muddle because of it. Castor and Pollux blast me to Bermuda!