Eric and Dylan at 40

What do you guys think of E+D being 40 this year? Wonder what different path they chose if the massacre never happen. Would they have cringe of what they thought of their teenage selves? And the young people that seem to admire them?

I question the things I did at 25.. let alone 17, so I would hope they would have thought differently about it.

It's hard to answer this question though, because most teenagers don't commit this kind of crime... and I sometimes find it hard to think of them as regular teens, even though in a lot of ways they were, but I don't think them just going to college or getting out of HS would have made them feel a lot better.

it's a strange thought for sure.

I believe that if columbine hadn't've happened, Eric would have taken a job as a videogame designer/programmer, after/during college, and most likely would drop into a different course as videogame making is a lot harder than it seems. There's also the possibility he could've joined the Marines as he had been trying to do.

Dylan, on the other hand, is a bit up in the air. My guess is that he would've gone to Arizona State, then gotten some job in IT or some form of that. His depression might affect this, he might've killed himself as he had been stating he wanted to.

They would never have seen the light of day at the age of 40, even without the Columbine massacre. I find it hard to imagine Eric and Dylan suicidal as hell, going to the age of 40.

Kinkeloukaitis wrote:

They would never have seen the light of day at the age of 40, even without the Columbine massacre. I find it hard to imagine Eric and Dylan suicidal as hell, going to the age of 40.

MTE, In Dylans case not even passed 19. Had the plan fallen through I think Dylan still would have killed himself not long after, which would have probably been in his dorm during his first semester at UA.

perpetual state wrote:

What do you guys think of E+D being 40 this year? Wonder what different path they chose if the massacre never happen. Would they have cringe of what they thought of their teenage selves? And the young people that seem to admire them?

They’d be 39 right now not 40. Make this post at the end of the year not the beginning of the year. I get that it’s 2021 and you’re basing it off that at the year they were born. But don’t forget, it’s only February, and eric was born in April and Dylan was September. So Dylan wouldn’t even be 39 and a half yet.

Realistically, I don't think that they would have lived until 40. Like many have said, Dylan would have killed himself and Eric might have done the same.

perpetual state wrote:

What do you guys think of E+D being 40 this year? Wonder what different path they chose if the massacre never happen. Would they have cringe of what they thought of their teenage selves? And the young people that seem to admire them?

As weird as it is to think Eric might have found his place, I think he would have with the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. Even if he still couldn't quite get the exact position he wanted he might have found something acceptable to him and gotten involved. Then at 40 even if he didn't still have a career he'd likely still be in the discussion groups, talking about his glory days in the field and following the emerging threats/situations that guys get into today. Or maybe he could have even made it as a career guy as his Dad could have probably advised him on how to do it.

A little harder for me to imagine what specifically what Dylan would be doing because so many different avenues emerged with computers, film, games, even apps and phones later on. But it seems likely to me that he'd settle in to something along those lines, probably dependent on when he finished school like if he made it straight through or if he goofed off and it took a while. Whatever happened to be big when he was finishing.

they might also have interesting opinions whenever school shootings did become a thing - if say all the plans were laid but they never did it. Although when I listed the stuff above I was thinking along the lines of them never having gotten all that close.

Not sure why my comment was disliked lol? Guess people just love to over-rush things and don’t like being told otherwise. Again, this post really should of been made at the end of 2021 not the beginning lol. I guess the age 39 doesn’t exist and we just jump right to 40. Dylan’s still 39 for another 7 months, not even 39 and a half yet but yeah they’re 40 lol. You’re just psychologically tricked by the fact you like that 40 is a nice crisp number, the beginning of the decade, where as 39 is the last year of the 30’s so it’s not as cool. But NOPE they’re not 40, they’re 39.

Like many others said before, it’s highly, highly unlikely that Eric and Dylan would have lived to be 40. Even if they somehow did not proceed with their mass murder plan, every hypothetical future scenario I can imagine for them would involve violent crime and/or early suicide in one way or another. But what I’m rather curious about is how (and if) Eric’s lackluster philosophy childish and simplistic teenage ideology would have changed over time, and whether there was actually some potential in it or the 25- and 30-year-old Eric still would have been a cringey edgelord who uses the phrase “natural selection” incorrectly only because it sounds cool. (Or he would have ditched the whole thing altogether, and it might have been the most probable course of events.)

I wish I had a dime every time somebody parroted that Eric had some misunderstanding of natural selection, and that animals killing other animals isn't natural selection, or that killing people isn't being the embodiment of natural selection.

That isn't some adult understanding, that's a teenage fedora wanting to lecture another teenage fedora that he doesn't understand middle school science concepts he understood exactly.  These kind of people would say Francis Galton the cousin of Darwin and a genius didn't understand evolution because he was a eugenicist - i. e. applied evolution. They're confusing the dopamine rush they get from being conditioned to parrot moral platitudes like "eugenics bad" with having superior powers of understanding.

They also think "but Eric was a person not nature" is a point as if people aren't natural, and as if artificial selection isn't guiding natural selection and the way everybody is introduced to the concept. In fact, that's why they're triggered. They're desperate to say "But when it's people it's artificial selection !!!!!! I know a middle school fact!!!!!!!" no people are also animals, world war 1 is also natural selection. it wasn't a breeding pen.

Darwin's own example of the benefits of natural selection was the English beating the snot out of the Turks. Darwin just didn't understand his own idea like me the big brain.

I’ve literally never met a single person who would say that animals killing animals or people killing people could not be a manifestation of natural selection.

It has nothing to do with morality or “murder bad” or whatever, I just can’t see how shooting random unarmed and unprepared people could benefit evolution or natural selection. Not to mention that the original plan was a bombing, i.e. it was even more indiscriminate and unpredictable. Not to mention that Eric, despite proclaiming himself to be “godlike” and superior to all humans, (un)naturally selected himself out of the gene pool without leaving offspring. Not to mention that a school shooting is an extremely rare event, unlike war, and even if Eric managed to kill 300 people like he wanted, his actions would have had virtually no impact on the course of human evolution.

Now if Eric managed to “kickstart a revolution” and school shootings started occurring on the scale comparable to WWI and WWII, it would have been a different story.

Eric probably thought that he was impacting evolution because he saw the people that he was killing as stupid and so was preventing more people from being born by these 'stupid people'.