If you knew then, would it really matter, now?

"If I knew then what I know now..." is a famous phrase we always say as we get older and when we make mistakes.
The real question is, if you did know then what you know now, how much of your life would actually be different?

Have you ever seen the movie "Time Travelers Wife?"
It's a story about a man who does have the powers to escape to his past and escape to his future. He knows what will happen but there's nothing he can do to change it.
He can go back in time to see his mom but he can't go back in time to save his mother when she died in a car crash.
He also can't change the path of his life to avoid the day he dies. He didn't know the actual year, he just knew the holiday and what he would be wearing.
He knows who he will marry.
He knows he'll have a beautiful daughter. What he didn't know was that his wife would have several miscarriages and stillbirth's before his daughter was finally born.

If I knew at 20 years old I'd be here today, sitting in this house, living on a Lake in North Carolina with no husband or kids, what would I have done differently in the last fifteen years?
What experiences might I have missed out on? What experiences, if any, would I have had?

Would I have avoided my move to Upstate, NY? What did I learn or what did I benefit from that year long experience? If moving there was a lesson to learn, I can say I learned something valuable that will benefit me today and in my future relationships.

If my family knew that my sister would've had a still birth, would we have enjoyed her first pregnancy as much as we did? If you ask me to be honest, I remember how excited I was and how much fun it was to plan her baby shower.

Maybe the reason we don't know our future is because we must learn to enjoy our life as it's happening. It'll unfold as it's meant to unfold.

Would it be more depressing to know your future and that you couldn't change it?

Let's talk about another movie, Butterfly Effect with Ashton Kutcher.

In this movie, his character does have the power to go back and change a situation.
One scene I remember the most was, when he was a teen, his friends and him were in the woods one day and his buddies decided to throw a fire rocket to a mailbox, what they didn't foresee was the woman of the household coming home; she got out of her van, got her baby and walked toward the mailbox. The rocket went off and killed the baby. He woke up in his future and it wasn't too bright; he didn't like it so what happened next was he went back to that moment in time, he changed things. He fought with his friends and the rocket was never launched, but, it went off anyway and he woke up years later, missing his arms.
The movie was confusing.
The point is, best choose wisely. I understood that movie to be have a "damn if you do, damn if you don't" kind of meaning.

It follows my, "which poison do you prefer?" philosophy of life.

I ask you the same, would you want to know you can look ahead to know now what will happen in five years?
If you knew now that one day you were to stumble across millions of dollars by winning a lottery, would you work as hard at your day job? Would you accept promotions and learn more about work to better yourself as a person in hopes of receiving financial rewards or would you not care because you know you'll win enough money to quit your job?
Or would you rather know you can go back in time to change the situation, even if you had to suffer a different consequence?