Would You Swap Your Life?
philosophy life ai reflection
I watched Good Fortune on a flight recently. Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut. Keanu Reeves plays Gabriel, a low-ranking guardian angel who swaps the lives of a struggling man and his wealthy employer to prove that money doesn’t solve everything. The plan backfires. The poor man thrives with money. Gabriel loses his wings and ends up washing dishes on Earth.
It’s a comedy. But the premise stuck with me for the rest of the flight.
Would I swap my life with someone wealthier?
The movie frames this as a simple body swap — you wake up in someone else’s house, with their bank account, their problems. Gabriel assumes the answer is obvious: money doesn’t matter. He’s wrong, at least initially.
But the question runs deeper than money.
What is life? To me, it’s experience. Connection. Consciousness. The feeling of being present in a moment — watching your child laugh, struggling with a problem, sitting on a flight writing notes about a movie. Life is not a balance sheet. It’s a sequence of moments you’re aware of.
What is wealth? Money is the obvious answer. But what about a richer set of experiences? More skills? Deeper knowledge? A wider perspective? Someone with less money but more curiosity might be wealthier in ways that matter.
Would I swap? Maybe yes. Not for the money — but for the chance to see more, feel more, experience a different existence. The appeal isn’t the bank account. It’s the different lens on the world.
Would I swap with someone poorer?
Poorer in what way? Less money? More ignorant? More naive?
That sounds like the younger version of myself. Even now, perhaps.
There’s a strange appeal to knowing less. Caring less. Worrying less. Living simply. The weight of knowledge is that you can’t unknow things. Every new skill, every new responsibility, every new awareness adds a layer of complexity to how you process the world.
Would I swap? Maybe yes — to care less, worry less, live with the lightness of not knowing what I know now. But I suspect I’d start learning again immediately. The drive to understand doesn’t come from circumstance. It comes from something deeper.
Would AI widen the gap?
The movie touches on income inequality. Gabriel ends up working a low-wage dishwashing job. The wealthy employer lives in a different universe. The gap between them isn’t just financial — it’s structural.
This connects to something I think about in my work. AI is replacing tasks that used to be entry points into the workforce. Food delivery, data entry, basic customer support. If these jobs disappear, what happens to the people who depended on them?
One reading of the future: AI replaces low-skill jobs, concentrates wealth further, and the gap between rich and poor becomes a canyon. Another reading: when automation handles basic needs, society is forced to redistribute. The rich have no choice but to share — not out of generosity, but because an economy with no consumers collapses.
The movie doesn’t answer this. Neither can I. But Good Fortune at least asks the right question: if one man’s struggle is another man’s fortune, what does that say about the system?
Would I live a life if I knew what would happen?
This is where the movie left me and a book picked me up.
I’ve been reading 《周易的野心》 (The Ambition of Zhou Yi) by Liang Dong. The book reframes the I Ching — not as a mystical divination manual, but as an ancient decision-making algorithm. King Wen of Zhou, imprisoned by the Shang dynasty, created a system to model uncertainty and guide action.
The Zhou Yi is not fortune-telling. It’s a framework for making decisions under uncertainty — the world’s oldest algorithm for navigating the unknown.
— Liang Dong (2024)
The parallel struck me. The I Ching works like a Large Language Model for ancient rulers. You present a situation (a prompt). The system returns a pattern (a response). You interpret it and act. The Zhou dynasty used hexagrams. We use transformers. The underlying need is the same: reduce uncertainty.
Doubt and fear come from uncertainty. If you knew the future — truly believed it would happen — would you still be afraid? Or would certainty itself become a different kind of prison?
I think I would not want to know. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it’s also what makes choices meaningful. A life where every outcome is known is not a life being lived. It’s a script being followed.
The movie’s angel Gabriel learns this the hard way. He thought he knew what would happen when he swapped two lives. He was wrong. And in being wrong, he experienced something new — cheeseburgers, cigarettes, the confusion of being human.
What I took from the flight
Good Fortune is a light movie with a heavy question. The I Ching is a heavy book with a practical answer.
Between them, I landed on something simple:
Happiness is wanting what you have.
Not because wanting more is wrong. But because the practice of noticing what you already hold — the experiences, the skills, the connections, the uncertainty itself — is the only wealth that doesn’t depend on a swap.