What's your "back pocket" wish?

z00s@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 127 points –

A few years ago I felt kinda lame whenever I had to "make a wish" blowing out birthday candles or whatnot and the only thing I could think of under pressure was "world peace".

Since then, I've kept a wish ready to blurt out if I ever see a falling star or toss a coin into a fountain etc

For me, it's sending my mind, with all my current knowledge and experience, back in time into my body at the moment I graduated high school, so I could re-live my life with more confidence, less anxiety and get straight into doing the cool bits of my life much earlier.

What would be your "back pocket wish"?

93

Well, “world peace” may not be original, but it isn’t bad.

Unless it's one of those monkey's-paw wishes, in which case everyone immediately dies.

“But they’ll make bigger boards and bigger nails until they destroy themselves”

I've always felt that unselfish wishes are more likely to get a pass from the monkey's paw.

I'm writing that into my head cannon. The monkey is cursed to punish greed, but it's benevolence is abundant!

That I had a wallet with exact change every time I opened it. Dinner? My treat, you tip. You need groceries? Give me the list. The lady in front of me at the dentist that can't get more care till her bill is paid? Is cash OK?

And when a certain billionaire realizes he's lost way too much money and wants to offload this website he purchased for way too much you could just write a check.

Or you can like pay off all the student loan debt because you just happen to have 1.3 trillion dollars in your wallet.

Or just travel around and pay off school lunch debts, overdue book fees at local libraries, and get a round for everyone at every ice cream truck I see.

everytime

I wish people knew this wasn't a word.

I'm not sure how exactly that improves the world but OK. I'll edit my comment. And from now on I'll be more careful about that. Not just this time, but everytime.

Anything becomes a word if enough people write it, and write it regularly enough that everyone else knows what the writer is trying to convey everytime.

It could be a word, like everybody or everything, perhaps a synonym for "24/7".

When times is the diner open? Everytime!

everytime

I wish people knew this wasn't a word.

Literally all words are made up. There isn’t some cosmic rule that says words have to be a certain way.

This means that as usage changes, new words are born.

Dictionaries recognize this better than the people who worship them. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Their job is to help people understand one another. Which is why the word “podium” in many dictionaries has a North American added definition for “see lectern.” Because when people in North America say “podium,” the usually mean a lectern. So now the word podium also means lectern.

So if enough people use “everytime” with sufficient frequency, it will enter dictionaries. Just like “anytime” did after people started using it in the 1800s. Same with “everyday.”

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t recommend using non-standard vocabulary in a formal setting, like an article or a paper or some technical document. But Lemmy posts are informal.

Edit: Also, for what it’s worth, I frequently offer corrections for spelling and syntax. Just…this type of vocab isn’t worth correcting (in my mind anyway).

Every day and everyday mean different things, so maybe not the best example.

"For chick pants to have dude pants pockets"

They make those. They are just dude pants.

Apparently those who wear tight fitting chick pants prefer not having lines from pockets or undies or whatever.

If you want a middle ground, look to athletic brands built for climbers.

There is a discernable difference in the cut of pants, notably among the hips, that make this a non-option for some. Pockets shouldn't come with the cost of looking like you're wearing a sack of potatoes, lol.

The masses have chosen, non potato ass in return for no pockets.

As long as I'm happy in the moment, I wish for "more of this" because I'm usually having a good time and with people I love.

I wish for my bestie's good physical and mental health. Preferably, she'll attain both at once in a way where she feels she earned it for herself.

Magic. And not ledgerdemain or magic that looks like things just kind of happened that sort of way, I'm talking magic missile, fireball, flying through the air blowing shit up, summoning familiars, castles in the sky, all that shit.

I love yours, and have one almost identical to it. But it's probably not one I would share with say, coworkers or casual friends. I have a "public and plausible" wish in addition to the fantastic and semi-private one. My public and plausible wish is usually that our lotto pool at work finally hits all the numbers. Considering the odds of that happening, it's damned unlikely, but at least it's theoretically possible. So maybe I should call it my "public and barely plausible wish".

I've always wished for Scarlett Johanssen, naked, to appear at the front door. It's yet to happen.

One of my buddies thinks she's plain / unattractive. Love the guy, but he's a complete idiot in this regard.

You didn't specify when. She will show up when she is elderly and in poor health. She'll knock on your door, then pass away.

It's always been to fly. Every time I blow out birthday candles, every time I fix my necklace chain, every time I blow away a fallen eyelash, every time I've thrown a penny in a fountain (oh how I miss the mall fountain!).

It never fucking works >:(

Flying is easy. It's surviving the landing that's difficult.

I used to always wish that things would work out for the best.

I guess it was too vague because that's not how things have been going.

What would be your "back pocket wish"?

That nobody is guilt tripped into making wishes on their birthday to satisfy social norms.

Check mate atheists.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”

How has that got anything to do with religion?

Since I was a kid, I settled on "$100 million." Simple. Enough to get you through life, but not being too greedy. Yet it's still never come true, so I'm beginning to think wishing on stars, candles, wells, etc... might sadly be bullshit.

I remember when I was around 12 or 13 I'd always say my wish would be to get 1 billion dollars per second, for the rest of my life, and that no one, including the government, would ever be suspicious of it

Health, happiness, and security for my kids.

Just to know that I'll be ok, I have a lot of chronic anxieties about the long picture future

On a personal level, a small house for my kids to live in before I die somewhere quiet. On a global level? Less privileged people would stop being taken advantage of by nefarious sources and systems designed to crush them.

Invulnerability. To age, sickness, death, anything that could physically harm me. I want to live forever.

Or barring that, telekinesis.

I just picture you floating in an endless void 100 billion years after entropy has moved every single subatomic particle away from each other. Somehow you have been sustained. The last sophisticated entity in the universe. Your billions of years of loneliness have already driven you to the point of insanity, enlightenment, insanity again, and finally a state of which no one could imagine. Because you don't consume food or water, you're in a perpetual state of hunger and thirst. You don't feel harmed, but you do feel peckish all the time. You could do with a draught. Your wish didn't allow for pain "thank God", you think.

And Cryophilia said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light --

That's exactly what I thought of while reading that answer.

Here's your monkey's paw.

Time goes on, and you overcome a lot of those anxieties with age. You get married, start a great job, buy a house, have a couple kids, and generally start feeling comfortable with life.

Then in a flash you are back in your high school head, knowing that no matter what you do, you'll never get the mix of circumstances just right to do it again, which means at best your kids cease to exist and at worst, you lose everything that gave your life meaning. And you can't share that pain with anyone. And on top of that, you're now mentally a 45-year-old in a teenagers body, and rather than feeling attraction to your peers, they now look like children to you. You're full of confidence, but any attempt to use that confidence feels like taking advantage of a child (even though you are physically the same age).

I think of that, because your wish is a horror story for me. Whenever it's brought up, I think no amount of getting in on the ground floor of k-cups stock or bitcoin, no preventing catastrophes, nothing I could do would make me feel it was worth losing my kids. And worse, making them never exist.

By the way, mine is "I wish for a blowjob." I've got what I need. But I'll always take a blow job (FROM MY WIFE, TO BE CLEAR).

I used to always want this wish until I adopted a dog under very specific circumstances (We were coming back from the mall and the car in front of us ran over him and kept going, we stopped, grabbed him and took him to the vet). Since then I always think that if I ever get to ask this wish it needs to be back to a moment where I had already rescued him, otherwise those very specific conditions might never happen. So I can completely understand someone with kids thinking the same way, that is a LOT more impossible to match the conditions.

That's not a monkey's paw, that's just... sad.

I wish I had a one car garage, in which any car I can think of would appear. I can drive it as long as I want, and park it back into the magic garage. I close the door. I think of a different car, open the door, and boom, there's that car.

No storage, no insurance, every car is always fully charged or fully fueled. Bikes, trucks, anything that fits in a normal garage. (No limos, tanks, battleships)

Edit, hmm, this one is not so simple. Seems a one-liner would be better for a quick response

Ever heard of the open source wish project?

My wish is to hear about it.

It was a short-lived project to basically rules-lawyer all the common wishes like wishing for wealth, long life, etc so you could still get them even from an uncooperative genie or a monkeys paw.

Polite company: peace, rest, calm, something like that.

Honestly: people to leave me the fuck alone and stop asking me to solve their problems and take care of everything. I'm burned out on being responsible for other people.

I think time travel would be the coolest. I'd like to see the distant future, see how far we've come. I'd like to go back and see historical moments and verify that they actually are what history says. I'm sure a nontrivial amount of our (distant) history as we know it is just wrong because the facts were lost to time.