If you have school-aged kids, you may have heard or played a game of “Would you rather?” In its purest form, you have to choose between two equally unsavory or unseemly options.
In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I play a round! We each chose a handful of questions and posed them to each other. See if you can guess what our answers would be, and we’d love to hear your answers too.
(Would you rather be more attractive or more intelligent? Would you rather swim with sharks or sleep in a house you knew to be haunted?…that opened up a whole can of worms, as it were…)
In the Q&A section, a listener looks for advice on justifying outsourcing cleaning even if she’s not currently earning much. We give her some new ways to think about this issue.
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My kids adore this game and we have literally played dozens of hours of it over the years. There are various card games/books, too, which come in handy for coming up with prompts after my own imagination is tapped dry.
A few other word games my kids love is:
Top Five – basically anything from top five favourite chocolate bars to holidays to episodes of their favourite TV show.
A to Z – where we pick a category (Christmas, birthday, Harry Potter) and take turns coming up with something that is related to that topic starting with each letter of the alphabet.
@Elisabeth — ooh, like the top 5 idea – and A to Z. We’ve tried with foods but I could see how opening up the topic would inspire a lot more thinking….
I’m glad that we can come to conclude that the question “Would you rather…” is perhaps more about the person writing the question, or perhaps the person’s perspective, than anything else, Ms. Laura Vanderkam.
Now, I do hope that I can send emails to you or connect with you on LinkedIn or on Facebook so that we can discuss it there Ms. Laura Vanderkam, so that I don’t have to turn this comment into a 5000-word-long comment. I’ve sent you emails to you in the past, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, but I have not yet received a reply from you. I have come to realize that the closer the “Would you rather…” question is to reality – or more precisely, the reality that I think that I am likely to encounter in my lifetime – the more willing I am to actually spend some time to consider what its answers will be. This brings me to the question “Would one rather have a longer Christmas vacation or a longer summer vacation”, as I can envision 2 people literally discussing it in the workplace, like, “Would you like to elongate your vacation at the end of this year by this amount of time or would you like to elongate your summer vacation by this amount of time”. For me, I usually see no difference between these 2 options. But there can be times when the elongated vacation is more optimal for me if it takes place at the end of the year, whereas there can be other times when the elongated vacation is more optimal for me if it takes place in the summer. This means that for the next year, I think that the longer vacation at the end of the year or the longer summer vacation suit me equally well, in fact, even if the elongated time, say 3 weeks, is broken into 2 parts, one part is 1-week-long and is given to the end of year whereas the other part is 2-week-long and is given to the summer, that also suits me. In the meantime, there can also be changes that emerge during the next year that make me realize that the longer vacation at the end of the next year is better than the longer summer vacation – or vice versa – I will not preclude that probability.
The question “Would you rather be more attractive or more intelligent” is something that I can only discuss with you by directly messaging you, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, since I have a dozen questions to ask you about that question.
Indeed, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, when you answered “Would you rather have a 1-minute conversation with your past self or with your future self”, you pointed out that one can write messages to one’s future self right now. I have actually written a set of goals back in Dec 2019 that I require my future self to fulfill, and the deadline for finishing these goals is set for 15 years or so from 2019. This is where you and I discussing things by me directly messaging you comes in handy, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, since I’ve sent myself an email of the list of these goals, and I can then take a screenshot of that email and send it to you so that you can see that the date is in Dec 2019 and that I’m not just making stuff up. So my 2019-self writing goals to my 2030s-self will be my 2019-self giving one-way instructions to my 2030s-self but cannot expect a reply from my 2030s-self when I was in 2019. Every time I finish 1 goal on this list – yes I have finished some of them – my present-day self will tell that to my 2019-self. The day my 2030s-self finishes everything on this list, my 2030s-self will tell that to my 2019-self, and my 2019-self may or may not be able to reply. If you don’t feel that this discussion is starting to get weird already, you can tell me that, and I’ll continue in another comment. And no, there are only 7 goals on this list, so it is not the same as the “List of 100 Dreams”.
Unfortunately, unlike Dr. Sarah Hart-Unger, I did not find the majority of the “Would you rather” questions to be fun, and I have no interest in asking someone else this type of question whatsoever. And as for “Would you rather never eat watermelon again or be forced to eat watermelon with every meal” and “Would you rather be in jail for 5 years or be in a coma for a decade”, I can only discuss them in detail with Dr. Sarah Hart-Unger, since she’s the one who raised these questions. In the meantime, my initial response to the question “Would you rather swim with sharks or sleep in a house you knew to be haunted” is actually quite the same with you and Dr. Sarah Hart-Unger. I have read the stuff that this person by the name of “Michael Shermer” has written for quite some time, and he even wrote a book called “Why People Believe Weird Things”, which addresses why some people believe in paranormal claims and superstitions. I’d like to discuss some of the views in the book with either him or some other staff members of the Skeptic magazine though, since I’m not saying that I 100% endorse this book either. In the meantime, I do think that we need to specify what we mean by “haunted”. I was going to explain that “Swimming with sharks is what those who have made a career in studying sharks would do and have already done, so if I’m in some bizarre situation that requires me to swim with sharks I can consult with those people on how to swim with sharks”. I then found that you, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, also arrived at the conclusion that there are those who will even pay to swim with sharks. When you and Dr. Sarah Hart-Unger then proposed “what if we change the aforementioned house to ‘a house with 3 pythons on the loose’”, I think that I’ll need to figure out where the house is, and discuss the situation with the local people. The local people will be the ones who deal with pythons and other “exotic” organisms – if that is even a suitable term here – in this region all the time, and I can figure out from them how we can confirm that there really are pythons coming in and out of this house, and if the pythons really are there, I can figure out with them whether or not it is safe to live with these pythons overnight, and if it is not, I can figure out how to block the pythons from entering the house with these people and also how to kill the pythons that hide in the house and refuse to come out with these people. I’m unable to tell you whether the choice of swimming with sharks or the choice of spending a night in a house “infected” by pythons is better, since I see neither situation actually showing up in my life, and I’ll need to discuss with not one, but a dozen professionals on what each option is really like, and figure out which one is somehow “better”.
In case you’re wondering, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, I have spoken publicly twice in 2021, and in both cases, there were organizations that host conferences and invited me to do presentations there. If another organization is to invite me to speak publicly in the future, I’d very much like to take that opportunity. And yes, I hope that Ms. Martha Stewart is able to, via some access, receive your compliments to her.