What is the meaning of life? To live. To live is to soak in new experiences through the skin, to acquire knowledge and improve yourself, to breathe and know that tomorrow is another day, with new horrible, joyful possibilities. To die is simply to stop evolving.
“Which day would you like to relive forever” is probably way too simple and lighthearted of a question for deep, existential thoughts, but it’s something I can’t help but wonder about when I hear it.
Questions like this, I believe, should be answered with the same basic concept as questions like “which food would you like to eat forever if you had to choose one?” In my case, the answer is salad.
A salad in turn becomes a placeholder for something potentially great. In a less “experimental” salad, you’ve got the greens, veggies and meats (occasionally), all chopped up and tossed together into the same bowl. Then you have room to add some dressing on top, maybe some Parmesan cheese, and boom, you’ve already got a plethora of possible combinations available.
However, the salad also holds a nebulous definition: Anything solid chopped up is basically a salad, at least from my way of thinking. This way, you can keep experimenting with the same old pile of greens so your tastebuds don’t metaphorically decay from eating a 5-star Michelin meal three times a day every day until you die.
The variation in choosing an inherently basic and flexible meal is the key to being able to eat it forever, which is the same when it comes to the topic of reliving one day forever. If you had to choose one, the key isn’t the enjoyability of the day, necessarily — instead, it’s the stability of it. You have to pick a day when you had all your essential needs for experimentation met — in my case, free time, transportation or a slightly older age.
If a hypothetical cruel god who assigns such horrible fates to our lives is susceptible to loopholes, I would ask to relive a day in my future instead of my past. Specifically on a non-school day around the time of April — because I like spring — in the year 2024. Is this a risky move? Yes, absolutely. But I think in these circumstances you have to go big or go home.
Similar to the salad, I would experiment with different activities each day to make use of my time.
The day I want to repeat is set this year to give me the opportunity to use a car. I’m currently a sophomore without a driver’s license, and as this is America, I can’t afford to be getting around with the poor public transportation system. An older-looking me would also have a better chance of getting a fake ID or passport for greater freedom of movement.
Perhaps I’d go on a plane somewhere and visit Europe. I could submit myself to the FBI, using some classified government secrets that I’d learned previously to prove my identity, and have some experimental surgery performed on me to figure out how I even got in this situation. Y’know, for funzies.
Yeah, I would probably not beat the original premise of Groundhog Day. But hey! At least I probably wouldn’t go insane either.
