[jyl]

I assume you only get to say gender, date, location, but whether you’re born rich or poor is random?

That makes a lot of historical places risky - draw the short birth stick in, say, Victorian England or Renaissance Italy and you’re doomed to a life of grinding poverty, even if you’re several cuts above the average person in smarts. I’d like to choose Venice in the 1600s, but it would be risky. I could be the kid hauling buckets of feces from palazzos he can’t ever hope to live in.

Something like male, born early 1940s, California would be good. You’d come of age during the surfer and hot rod era, the swinging sixties, etc, but too old for the Vietnam draft, and there was a lot of upward mobility, good public education, etc. There’s antibiotics and X-rays, no Black Death, no AIDS (hey your sexual orientation would also be random), big-block Fords and E-types, color TV and transistor radio.

If you also get to choose economic status and personal attributes (like, I’m me but rich, tall, good-looking, and possessed of endless charm and indefatigable bedroom prowess) then lots of places and eras open up.