The experience was torturous overall, but considering it’s basically time travel and I’d know everything about the future up to 2024, I think I’d do a lot better at everything a second time around. I’d be amazingly good at BASIC and Pascal when I was 7, and would definitely buy that Amiga C compiler this time. I’d be pretty bored with all the 8 and 16 but Sega games since I already played them but I’d also get an SNES, since I missed all that last time. School would be easy af, and i’d feel like a pervert dating middle and high school girls so might as well just test out and get a PhD when I was 12 or something.

Oh, the real question. What would I rather I did differently? I should have spent less time reading my own books and playing video games at home, and focused on the studies school wanted me to do so I could test out and just start taking university courses rather than stay in the slog of middle and high school. Socially it was awful and not sure what I could have done at the time. I ended up dropping out and getting a GED after 9th grade, and did great on the ACT, could have gotten scholarships, but decided to do self employment rather than go to college, which wasn’t a great plan overall due to the specifics of what I chose and what happened.