Other than Save Sara Connor, everyone has this wrong.

Faking an identity is easy. Back then it was all paper, and for Americans, SSNs were only just barely standard. Say you grew up in some rural bumblefuck place and sign up for everything fresh. Full Tara Westover story would work.

Next, find your grandparents. Convince them you know them from something through a friend they've mentioned to you and crash on their couch long enough to get a basic job, then apartment, car, and grow a moustache. Which should take about 3-4 weeks. Restist your mom's advances and attempts to take you to a high school dance.

Next, get to the west coast and start selling and buying up real estate. Buy and sell Hollywood back to itself until 1988. Then start buying real estate in New York. On the side, buy stock in all the classic tech companies, Nintendo, and in the military industrial complex. By 1993, you'd be a millionaire. From there, do whatever you want. Buy early and sell AOL stock. Blackberry. GE.

Then do good things in the world. Pull the fire alarms in the WTC at 8:45am on 9/11. Get a certain orange therapy so he stays with Ivanna for the kids. Invent Paypal first and steal the other half of it from Peter Thiel. Convince Woz, Gates, and Jobs that the future is in open source software. Find Linus Torvalds and mail him a billion euros. The morning before the Citizens United decision, bribe Clarence Thomas to abstain and pull the fire alarm. Mail Bernie Sanders $52 every week, anonymously. Get the pilots of Pam Am 103 super hammered the night before so the fight gets cancelled. Organize a London public transit boycott for 7/6/2005 lasting 3 days. Find the people that cancelled Firefly and murder them, wear their faces as a mask, and make sure the series goes at least 5 seasons.

You know, chill stuff like that.

Cease to exist

I'd miss my wife.

Buy stock in all the obvious companys

Shift in the womb. Maybe kick a little to let my mom know to eat something for the both of us.

Begin existing somehow because i wasn't born for about a decade

Find evidence of Trump's crimes and try to get him convicted, or at least discredited, before people even think about electing him

Oh no I'm back in the nutsack. A shitty situation to be aware of things

I was born in 1983, so everything?

What is my living situation? Do I have money? If I have the resources I'm gonna be planning a roadtrip to remove a bunch of future problems from the timeline.

Immediately make a list of everything that will happen in the future that I can bet on or invest in.

Check what season of TNG is on and get ready to leave home early.

First I'd bask in all the social and financial safety nets that Reagan and the Bushes hadn't been able to destroy yet. Watch some pro-union TV ads. Then try to meet Mr Rogers and Ramblin' Rod.

Then I'd probably try to invent rechargeable lithium tetrahydride batteries a couple years ahead of time, use the money to invest in MS and Oracle, and funnel the profits to Enron and Bernie Madoff before their bottoms drop out. Once I'm too rich to jail, I'd have some other people I'd want to "meet"... while armed.

Weird, this image has all the artifacts like if it's on its 30th screenshot&repost, but I never saw it before

I'd put out what I can remember of 'Graceland' and beat Paul Simon to the punch.

Get really confused because I've never been then before

Sell my hockey cards and buy Microsoft.

Not knowing the specifics of how this game works, but assuming I'm 17 again and everything is the same as it was, I go to my first GF's house and... yeah.

Because that was one of the best years of my life. I hope the game is that I get to live my life over from that point, knowing everything I know now, because I would do a lot differently.

Go back to sleep. Finally I can get the 43 years of sleep I always wanted!

Buy some stock.

buy bitcoin

Not exist I guess.

Stop my parents from meeting.

visit New York and take out some trash before it gets too orange

Get a "hoard bitcoin" tattoo on my thigh.

After kind of freaking out I'd remember all the information I've accumulated over my previous lifetime and be pretty happy. I'd know what the future holds and use that to my advantage.

Assuming my wife would be gone so I'd probably grieve for a very long period. Or is there a way to go back? Or is she there too? MARIE??? WHERE ARE YOU MARIE????

Save Sarah Connor

To me it seems, even if we were plopped down into the moment and everything is again exactly as it was, that from that instant forward things would change. Nothing would play out the same way, and the farther we moved along the timeline from that point, the more things would be different. Five years after you arrive, it's a very different world from the one you knew before, or read about. It's chaos theory.

So, the idea that one could shape the future, by stopping expected future events is silly, apart from the immediate future around the instant you appeared, but good luck remembering any of that, if you were even alive then before. Everything will spin off in different directions on a second pass, nothing will play out the same exact way.

The really big things like the climate issue and the eventual fall of USSR are still going to happen, but no one will listen to you, same as today. There might still be a big terrorist attack around 2001, but exactly what and where will be unknown to you, but more likely it will be years before or after, or not at all. Lottery numbers won't be the same, there won't be the same companies on the stock market. The knowledge about the future-past you experienced is useless.

The only thing that helps is your knowledge about life's universal principals, and a better understanding what you do and don't want for yourself. Your life will be different, because you'll be able to make better choices, but everything else will be different too.

Start doing food prep. Guess I'll have to start making my own oat milk and tofu.

I'd still be in the womb so... Try and get the umbilical chord to wrap around my neck.