Practice learning an instrument, just 20 minutes a day at least. It’s small, but being proficient in instruments is correlated with better communication between the two brain hemispheres, and it’s generally accepted that this is a causal relationship.

You are doing yourself a favor by learning to play an instrument.

Of course the things you’re doing in the present could cause large changes in the future. The problem is those changes are largely random, and it’s often very unclear whether you’ll be making changes for better or worse or just different.

The butterfly effect worry of traveling to the past isn’t about you making intentional changes – it’s that any change could propagate through the chaotic system and have unexpected, seemingly random effects. It might change the future for the better, or for the worse, or just make things weird. But the crucial point is that the present you’re used to and consider ‘normal’ – your home – might be irrevocably changed, perhaps ruined.

When you’re just living life in the present, though, you’re not worried about the possibility of changing the future because the future isn’t yet set (in your perspective). You’re not worried about what the future might gain or lose, because from your perspective in the present, the future doesn’t have those things yet, so it can’t gain or lose them.

And then there’s the whole definition of ‘changes’. Change as opposed to what? Every different possible choice or action might end up having far-reaching consequences in the future, even when you choose to do nothing. Maybe because you chose to stay at home and do nothing, you avoided a deadly car accident that would have otherwise happened and would otherwise have killed a guy. And then maybe that guy goes on to cure cancer … or maybe that guy goes on to be a brutal dictator of a post-collapse nation. In either case, your choice to stay at home and do nothing has spared his life and greatly changed the future. And you’ll never have any idea that you had any possible influence on whether that happened or not. You won’t know that you changed anything, because it’s the only reality you know and the only timeline you know.

In fact, half of Lemmy will tell you that no thing you are doing makes any impact on the future. Lot of doomers and nihilists here.

The butterfly effect is real.

The problem is finding the right butterfly.

The fallacy here is that in the hypothetical time travel you get to come back and enjoy the fruits of your butterfly squashing. Changing something now (e.g., assassinating a key political leader) ends your existence in the reality you’re changing. It ruins the fantasy.

Guerilla gardening with native plants

The difference is that in going to the past you have some idea of how things played out and what changes might matter. The changes that come up in time travel discussions are things like “kill this person before they do anything” or “let this guy into art school” or “cancel this one particular flight.” By the time the real consequences of possible small changes are known, you need more than small changes to acheve your objective.

Go back in time, acquire wealth. Realise that wealth isn’t enough to fix the world against the other wealthy.
Go back in time, acquire more wealth. Realise that wealth still isn’t enough to fix the world against the other wealthy.
Go back in time, acquire all the wealth. Cheat, steal, lie, kill to get to the top to fix the world, and then look at the trail of devastation you left in your wake.

I am constantly producing, and sharing, art with the world. I try to post several new pieces each week!