The genie grants you a wish. What is it?
So, one wish. Here it is: once a year, for one week, everyone on Earth swaps bodies with someone whose life looks nothing like theirs.
A long-haul trucker becomes a kindergarten teacher. A CEO becomes a line cook who gets home at 1am. A teenager becomes a 72-year-old retired farmer. A suburban Western mom wakes up as a market vendor in Marrakech, fluent in a language they’ve never studied, haggling like they were born for it. Think Freaky Friday,* but with eight billion people and no hair-and-makeup budget.
*Freaky Friday: a cinematic scenario in which two people switch bodies, learn a life lesson in under 97 minutes, and are returned with their hair fully intact.
There are three ground rules, and they apply to all of us.
Rule one: it never happens during a bad time. If you’re caring for a sick loved one that week, you don’t swap. You stay right where you are, with them.
Rule two: nobody has to do anything that goes against their moral code. You’re borrowing a life, not auditioning to be a villain.
Rule three: everyone gets all of their host’s memories. Nobody learns empathy while hunting for the cutlery drawer in a stranger’s kitchen.
At the end of the week, we all go back to being ourselves. Just ourselves. We’d still overthink our emails, still have strong opinions about the thermostat, still say “no worries” when there are, in fact, several worries.
But maybe we’d have a bit more compassion.
Maybe we’d be a bit more understanding.
Maybe we’d come home with new ideas about how to make the world a better place, because we’d have spent a week living in the part of it we’d only ever fleetingly wondered about. Multiply that by eight billion, and I like our odds.
That’s the whole wish. No gold, no private island, just a planet’s worth of people who’ve each walked a week in shoes that don’t fit.
