Auto-Saving

I've blogged about life being an open-world choose-your-own-adventure game, but there's an element of this "game" that I haven't mentioned yet. It auto-saves.

Most video games allow you to save the game at certain points, so if you have to quit, or if the game crashes, you don't lose the progress you've made up to that point. For example, in the Mario Bros. games, you have to beat each level in order to move on to the next one. If you beat a particularly difficult level, so can save the game so that the game will remember that you've beaten the level, so you don't have to try to beat it again.

Saving the game generally means saving your progress, which is a good thing, but saving the game can also be a bad idea, depending on the circumstances. Let's say that, in that Mario game, you manage to beat the difficult level, but it took you many tries and cost you many lives to do it. Instead of saving the game now, you might reload the game from your previous save and try to beat the level again - without losing so many lives this time.

Some games don't give you that option. Some games auto-save every so often, which is helpful in that you're never at risk of losing much progress, but it's also harmful in that it prevents you from going back to change the past.

Life is a game that auto-saves constantly. Because of this, you will never have to go back and relive any part of your life. This also means that you will never get to go back and relive any part of your life, even if there are things you wish you had done differently. What's past is permanent.

I find this slightly terrifying. Any choice I make now, any action I take, becomes a permanent part of history the instant I've done it. If I spend five seconds tying my shoelaces, those are five seconds that I'll never be able to have spent any other way. If I eat a tuna sandwich for lunch, I will never be able to go back and have eaten a chicken sandwich instead. Once an action has been performed, it's done, and there are no checkpoints I could go back to to make a different decision.

But while this aspect of life is frightening, it's also liberating. I know I can't change the past, so there's no point in wishing I could. If I can never replay a level to try to get a better score, I don't have to worry about my past scores being less than perfect. There's nothing I can do about that now, except to learn from my experiences. I can't change the past, so I might as well make peace with it and use what I've learned to create a better future. In Mario games, the levels tend to get harder as you go, but you also become a better player. You can use tricks you've learned and experiences you've had in the earlier levels to help you play better in the later levels. There's no point in being stuck in the past.  Where our minds really ought to focus is on the present and the future.

Because the choices we make become permanent as soon as we make them, we must be careful which choices we make now and which ones we plan to make in the future. We can't go back to change our decisions later, so it's important that we try to make wise decisions the first time. Granted, it's impossible to make perfectly wise decisions all the time, but the better decisions we make now, the happier we'll be in the future, and the less regrets there'll be in a past that we can't change.