/lit/ - Literature

>>22029366
I thought about it a little yesterday, thanks for the reminder.

By many accounts this idyllic life sucks. I've heard it from many places but this case made a particularly deep impression on me:
>When I was a boy I heard them tell of an old farmer in Vermont. He was dying. The minister was at his bed-side – asked him if he was a Christian – if he was prepared to die. The old man answered that he had made no preparation, that he was not a Christian – that he had never done anything but work. The preacher said that he could give him no hope unless he had faith in Christ, and that if he had no faith his soul would certainly be lost.
>The old man was not frightened. He was perfectly calm. In a weak and broken voice he said: “Mr. Preacher, I suppose you noticed my farm. My wife and I came here more than fifty years ago. We were just married. It was a forest then and the land was covered with stones. I cut down the trees, burned the logs, picked up the stones and laid the walls. My wife spun and wove and worked every moment. We raised and educated our children – denied ourselves. During all these years my wife never had a good dress, or a decent bonnet. I never had a good suit of clothes. We lived on the plainest food. Our hands, our bodies are deformed by toil. We never had a vacation. We loved each other and the children. That is the only luxury we ever had. Now I am about to die and you ask me if I am prepared. Mr. Preacher, I have no fear of the future, no terror of any other world. There may be such a place as hell – but if there is, you never can make me believe that it’s any worse than old Vermont.”
(Take particular note of the fixation on clothing. Simply keeping your family dressed was a full-time job in pre-industrial society, it took an unbelievable amount of labor.)
You can make it idyllic regardless. If you're a terraformer and the world isn't full of other people you can make the land as bounteous as you want. But there's a lot of pathos you can wring from it, from having his past self idealize the simple life only for him to hate every minute of it once he has to live it—without knowing that he inflicted it upon himself.

There are other directions you can go. Permutation City by Greg Egan has characters who need to decide how to spend eternity in a world where they have full control over themselves and their environment. This one guy (in pic related) gives himself hobby obsessions at random intervals. He spends a few decades writing operas, then he spends a few decades studying mathematics, then he spends a few decades making wooden table legs. He didn't erase his memory, he knows exactly what's going on, but that's fine because he programmed himself to genuinely care.
This is not your scenario. But you can consider the self-programming angle, altering not just his memories but his deeper psychological qualities. Maybe it's starting to wear off, and he suddenly finds himself interested in engineering again.