It’s a pretty common question to get to know people, isn’t it? “If you could have three wishes what would you wish for?” Naturally, the first thing you end up doing is qualifying that you can’t “wish for more wishes.” After that, you tend to hear the same variety of responses: I want to live forever! I want a trillion dollars! I want to fly! Well way to go moron, you just blew all of your wishes on things that suck.

“Well then smarty pants, what would you wish for?” I’ll get to that don’t worry, but first I’m going to tell you why those things suck:

Living forever: Yeah…that’s gonna get boring. While it’d be awesome to see how humanity changes over the millennia, it’s not really worth the forever part. I mean what’s gonna happen when you live 5 or 6 lifetimes and have everyone you ever loved or hated die 5 times over? It’s gonna get old. You gotta think outside the box!

Try this wish instead: How about time travel? Wish for the ability to instantly travel to any time period you wish. Then you can see how humanity fairs, you can meet all sorts of people from different eras, and best of all, you don’t have to live through the crappy times! Now isn’t that a much better wish?

A Trillion Dollars: First of all, that much money in paper form wouldn’t fit inside your house. If you don’t get it in paper form, the government will seize those assets so fast you won’t know where your money went. Then, even if you do get the money off scott free…yay. Then you’ve got money, and we all know money doesn’t buy happiness. You could even do everything listed in my winning the lottery article and not be truly happy. Your wish is going to get really old, really fast.
Try this wish instead: Wish that you never had to sleep anymore, yet you felt as refreshed as though you got a full night every night. If you want money, work a second or third job while everyone else is sleeping. But again, that won’t buy you any happiness. The best thing you could do with this extra third of your day is whatever you want. Learn a new craft, master a game, or just learn something brand new. There really isn’t a limit to what you can do.

Flying: We’ve covered this before, but flying is a stupid wish in all reality. Yay you can fly, big whoop. Using your previous wishes you could just time travel to the future when space travel is commonplace and float around in Zero G, or take a skydiving class at night while you’re not sleeping and boom! You’re flying. Really, the possibilities are endless.

Try this wish instead: Teleportation! Seriously, if you could just go from one place to another instantly, no holds barred, why would you want to fly there? I’ll already have been there done whatever cool stuff you wanted to do and been back before you even took off. You really want to fly that badly? Just teleport up in the sky and teleport back to the ground before you hit the ground. There. Problem solved. Who in their right mind would wish to fly? Geez.

Hopefully now when you find that magical genie (side note: who calls it a Djinn anyways? We live in ‘MERICA last I checked, it’s a genie, and he’s big, blue and has a voice like Robin Williams) you’ll be able to accurately wish for the best things, not your impulsive wishes that any five year old could make. Of course if you CAN wish for more wishes…do that, instantly.