I've begun a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story that's more a philosophical argument (or art?). There are a lot of paths through the story but they all converge to the same ending.

It's something I have believed and have especially reflected on when my mother died a couple years ago. I have wondered for some time whether she could have been happier had "x" happened instead of "y".

She had such a bad childhood that I contemplated what it would be like to clone her and raised her as my daughter. How different might her life be if she had a healthy, happy family.

But I keep coming to the conclusion that she was an inherently unhappy person and, that while plenty of life-events may have made things worse for her, in the end I think perhaps she was "fated" to be unhappy after all.

So the idea was a "Choose your own adventure" where you more or less end up in the same place regardless. Maybe a bit wealthier, maybe with 2 instead of 3 kids — but the fundamentals were already "cast".

(And anyway, upon further reflection I came to see how much my oldest daughter is more or less my mom. We raised her as best we can and yet shades of my mom's "genetics" are clearly there.)

When I was a child, my mother told me that it was like I "wanted to be miserable."

I didn't want to be miserable - I was autistic, ADHD, and brain damaged, but undiagnosed on all counts.

The old nature vs nurture! I'm also curious about this and I have a fairly good chance at gaining some anecdotal insight!

A family member who I'm very close with was adopted from South America. He doesn't speak Spanish, but had managed to find his biological family. He wants to visit them sometime, and had asked me to come along as a translator.

Will be interesting to see how similar he is from his biological siblings, in terms of personality. I've gotten the impression his biological family is quite poor, and he was raised in one of the richest countries in the world. Cultures are very different too, Scandinavia Vs south America.

If nurture matters at all, he'll be different from his biological siblings. If not, we should be able to isolate a "awesome bro-dude" gene from his biological family's DNA.

Wouldn't that be cool?

The plain reading of quantum field theory, is that we don't always end in the same place, but that we get to go down all the paths.

I believe that is true, both in the technical physical sense, and as having a solid implication for the experience of existence.

That was the best thing about those books. We got to go down all the paths. Have all those lives.