Red pill = language masta, blue pill = music masta (hypothetical)

♪ Who are they/Where are they/How can they possibly know all this? ♫

These are always fun for thought reddit threads. Get your thinking mode on: it’s deal time

Red pill makes you fluent in every spoken language. Blue pill makes you a master of every musical instrument in the world. Which do you swallow?

Top rated comments:

Red pill, travel the world. Listen to music played by people that swallowed the blue pill….

Win win for me

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you take one, have a friend take the other, travel together.

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My immediate response was blue, as I play two instruments and the idea of being awesome at them appealed. Then I realised what I enjoy about my instruments is improving and feeling exhilarated when I master something difficult. So blue pill, whilst making me good, would take away a lot of my enjoyment in making music.

The red pill however, I hate learning languages because I’m terrible at it, and could actually be useful more often. So I wouldn’t lose anything by taking the red pill.

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You didn’t specify every extant spoken language. So, I could take this red pill, and I would suddenly know, with intimate detail, every language ever spoken in the history of the world. I would know what language was spoken in Harappa, for example. I would know the sounds of the first human languages.

And by knowing which languages I know, I would be able to piece together a more complete vision of human history. I would know of groups that had died out and left no archaeological record. I could draw inferences about relationships, and population movements. Languages that we thought were lost forever–say, many of those spoken in the New World–would no longer be! Instead of scant word lists compiled by missionaries, there could be entire dictionaries and grammars.

It would be more than a lifetime of work, but what a lifetime it would be!

Being the master of every musical instrument in the world is tempting, but I don’t think it can compete.

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Red pill! I’m living in China now, and not knowing the language is very alienating.

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PLAYGUUU! [.]

REAVAREAVAREAVAREAVAREAVA [.]

…that’s about right. I think with blue you could just compose beautiful music (saw this little diddy on mfisn with 93 likes: 0 dislikes) and find that rewarding , but I think I would choose the red pill and be a fine connoisseur of all things nice (especially if it included mastering all fine programming languages)

hmm yes

And if you listened to the song attached way above, checkout equally haunting/catchy Chinese version of  Jem’s They titled ‘Le Yuan‘ with completely different lyrics:

plays like a video game or tim burton tune

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Update: here is an NPR audio on why it’s easier to learn another language young in life (listen @15min in)
Also I probably should have referenced Limitless in some way