Perfect health seems kinda suss. That pill looking like a cigarette
4 and 5 for sure. 4 is essentially immortality to everything but instant kills. 5 means infinite money.
4 & 7
Wait so 5. gives me effectively infinite money?
I know right? You show up and be like “One mansion, please” and the realtor says something like “sure, our cheapest one is $2M”.
So you reach into your pocket and out comes the exact change of $2m! Bust is it
Let’s do some fun math!
If we assume you always have a dollar in your pocket and that it takes around 3 seconds to grab them from your pocket.
For one year (8766 hours or 31,557,600 seconds) you will have 10,519,200 dollars. Assuming you don’t stop while eating for example and also you don’t sleep.
Elon Musk’s net worth is around 250 billion dollars (250,000,000,000). You will need 23,766 years of non-stop pulling bills to reach him.
Thats not how it was said. It said you had the exact change anytime. So If you buy something for 4 mill you get 4mill. If you buy sum for 1.59 you get that
No; not infinite.
Limitless yes, but it is limited by the fact that it only fills your pocket when you’re expected to pay for something. Therefore you’d be inconvenienced by anything that does not expect you to pay up front cash for a thing, and you’d need someone to tell you the exact amount you need to pay them to cause the pocket to generate the cash as well as the amount would be limited by the size of your pocket(s) and/or purse(s) for containing money.
Despite that you could definitely live “comfortably”.
ETA: My picks are 3 & 4.
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Open a new checking account with a debit card
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The account is always at a $0.01 balance
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Keep this card in its own specific pocket
Now anytime you go to buy something, the exact amount will be deposited into the account and immediately withdrawn for said purchase.
Congratulations, literally everything costs a single penny.
Implement the selling of items, the transfers to alternate accounts, etc., and you can create infinite money.
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Omnilingual and perfect health. Boom. Next question.
3 and 4. Making great works of art would be easy peasy, then proceeding to be a couch potato while eating junk food and not having to worry at all about clogged arteries, diabetes, etc? Never having to worry about diseases? Count me the fuck in.
4 and 6
- 1 is useful if you travel a lot (i don’t)
- 2 is mostly a hassle
- 3 i already have
- 5 you get easy with 6.
- 7 is cool but useless
- 8 gets quickly boring
Btw, “perfect health” = no aging, right?
So 8 is like a one time feeling of love? That sure beats telekinesis
Number 1 has the most utility
3 and 4. Perfect health is a no brainer and lets you enjoy life for way longer. And the natural talent one would let you easily learn the skills to come close to perfect memory and to know every language, giving you the benefits of 1 and 2 as well.
So, right off the bat let’s just assume there are no “monkey’s paw” style downsides to these for this discussion.
Perfect memory mostly encompasses omnilingual because you’d only need to learn every word and rule one time and know it forever. Perfect memory also encompasses natural talent because muscle memory is a form of memory as well so all mental and physical skills would be incredibly easy to learn. No monkey’s paw: You don’t get bad memories forever stuck in the front of your consciousness.
The only upside omnilingual has over perfect recall is knowing dead languages no one else does.
The only upside for natural talent is that it probably makes you get stronger quicker. Gaining muscles is not a matter of remembering.
Perfect health is tempting because you’d live a long life without concerns of problems. No monkey’s paw: You can still die of old age or decide to end our own life. Let’s also say you can’t just skip sleep or skip eating and be fine. You still have to do the bare minimum to take care of yourself, you’re basically not a zombie (how they seem to just live forever).
Always having exact change is essentially infinite money. It’s fair to assume that for purchases where enough physical money couldn’t fit in your pocket that you’d get something like a prepaid debit card with the money you’d need. Even for things that you don’t pay with from your pocket (like buying a house) you could still go to the bank and fill out a slip saying you’re depositing a million dollars and get the money in your pocket to do so. Then wire the money over once it clears.
For time pausing whole you’re asleep, I’m going to interpret this as the ability to get rest without wasting your time. So essentially you don’t need to sleep. You still need to but for whatever reason you get the time back. So you still would need to take some time to find a bed and fall asleep but that’s still about a full 7 extra hours every day. Assuming you sleep 8 hours and are awake 16 you’re missing a third of your life. Sure, there isn’t as much to do when everyone is asleep but that’s still a nice effective extension to your life. No monkey’s paw: you aren’t stuck in some frozen time world forever the first time you sleep lol.
An interesting conundrum is picking between the free sleep and perfect health pills. If you’re already pretty healthy and have a low risk factor for diseases that affect quality of life but not the length of your life you may want to consider the perfect sleep power because it is going to roughly double your time.
Telekinesis is a curve ball. Saying it is only as strong as you are I will interpret it as meaning it is basically just another muscle and you can wear yourself out doing it. It’s cool but given those limitations I personally don’t find it worth it.
The tasty love pill is basically the opt out choice. It doesn’t do anything other than give you a one-time unique experience. I’m treating it as a none of the above.
So really it comes down to these:
- Omnilingual: if you specifically want to know dead languages no one knows (an extremely niche situation that might fascinate some anthropologists)
- Perfect memory: Effectively being able to learn to do anything new (including physical tasks) super quick while also memorizing anything instantly.
- Natural talent: you specifically want to gain muscles quick but don’t care as much about perfect memory.
- Perfect health: Better than free sleep for most people. Ensures you live aong and high quality life.
- Exact change: It’s just infinite money.
- Free sleep: Better for folks who are already healthy and don’t have many risk factors since it will roughly double your time you get to spend doing things.
- Telekinesis: A cool little power for the folks who are otherwise satisfied with their current abilities, life, and money. 8: Yummy love: A meme answer.
A lot of this can be summarized to,
- Do you want to be really good at things?
- Do you want to have a higher quality of life for longer?
- Do you want to be hyper rich?
Personally I think I’d want to really good at things. Specifically number 3, natural talent. I think being able to easily get fit would outweigh the benefits of having a truly perfect memory. Also there’s a lot of skills that just require raw discipline and not any sort of memory. I think I could get a lot of the benefits of perfect health by becoming more disciplined. I think this a great well rounded choice.
Infinite money is very tempting but also an incredible burden. Suddenly every problem you see becomes one you could solve if you just gave the money. It would give me a lot of guilt.
I’d watse my time I could be sleeping just doing stupid stuff. Perfect health is tempting though.
I think you’re overselling Perfect Memory a fair bit here. Just because you can perfectly recall something you’ve seen, doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to use it. E.g. just because you’ve memorised a manual on working a forklift, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly qualified to work as a forklift operator.
Languages, especially non-Latin based languages, require a whole different way of thinking about things that you won’t get from pure memory.
I disagree about the natural talent one. From my perspective thats the obvious first pick. At work I’m currently training to be a Crane Operator and struggle busing hard with it. Like yeah I could use it to get muscles but thats not even where I first went just because imo the ability to quickly learn a new skill is invaluable. imagine being a natural at negotiating business dealings to get a favorable outcome for your side. once you figure out how to turn your natural talent into money a lot of the other things will be able to fall into place.
damn now i feel stupid for quickly weighing out the pros of each and deciding when you wrote this whole essay studying the exact pros and cons of each and how useful they would be in everyday life, then simplifying the list down
I disagree about the natural talent one. From my perspective thats the obvious first pick. At work I’m currently training to be a Crane Operator and struggle busing hard with it. Like yeah I could use it to get muscles but thats not even where I first went just because imo the ability to quickly learn a new skill is invaluable. imagine being a natural at negotiating business dealings to get a favorable outcome for your side. once you figure out how to turn your natural talent into money a lot of the other things will be able to fall into place.
As someone who has chronic health issues nd increasingly severe Memory Impairment (possibly early onset Alzheimers), I would give almost anything for the perfect health. Hell, I would be over the moon just for average health.
I can’t even begin to explain how much it hurts to be surrounded by people who could choose to be healthy but are just apathetic, uncaring, lazy or ignorant of how much of a blessing it is to be able to exercise, get fit, run, swim or even jut walk round without feeling utterly exhausted after or to remember the things they love and enjoy.
2 & 4 with perfect memory you can learn anything.
It’s 2 and 3 for me.
I’m surprised not more people are choosing 4. It’s not so much a guarantee of long life, but that you’d never suffer any debilitating diseases (think cancer, diabetes, dementia etc).
The other one would probably be 3. Could use those skills to make money so kinda offsets against potential infinite money glitch in 5.
