you name a major animated cartoon that aired on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, or Disney and there’s a good chance they have what I consider the stock “age regression/progression” episode.
Phil from the Future!! First thing that came to mind for me, lol. They had a piece of tech that could age you up or age you down, and the main character, Phil, was hit by it. Turned into a total kid. One of the funniest episodes for me back in the day... I miss the Disney Channel. :(
Yeah, this is pretty close to my answer, which was omnipotence. Having complete control over anything and everything just by your own imagination would be my answer any day of the week! I'd make myself functionally immortal and indestructible as the first thing I'd do, then probably start building universes of my own.
I think a lot of folks who say they wish they could be invisible don't realize how horrible it'd actually be without secondary superpowers. The reason you don't currently fall over and you're able to grab what you're looking at is because you can see your own body and gain a sense of direction. But if you're invisible... how do you know where your feet are going to land exactly? How do you know how far your arm is from that book you're trying to pick up?
It'd be pretty hellish to constantly trip over yourself and not be able to balance yourself at all! This kind of caveat applies to a lot of superpowers, like super strength. Sure, you're strong enough to lift that car, but your bones and flesh aren't. They'll be crushed under the weight and you'll have a big problem, lol.
That said... superpower? I'll go with omnipotence. It's always my answer to any "if you could have X, what would it be?", omnipotence!! It's basically EVERYTHING that I could ever possibly want packed into one. Imagine the sort of life you could have. The sort of freedom. What could you do, create, see, experience, feel. I do daydream about it more than I should.
That is still one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies. It's so good! It got so much flak but I really enjoyed it. The concept was very interesting and I really wanted to see where it could've gone. I felt like they could've done better in the movie but still, I'll take what I can get.
I always wondered why the jumpers were even struggling against the paladins, though. I mean... they could jump literally anywhere in the world instantly. How are the paladins even able to catch up at all even with the tech they had? It was ridiculous. They also didn't use guns? I didn't get it, lol.
And it's time to make pineapple pizzas illegal!! Lol. I wouldn't worry so much about your memories. Other folks in here have suggested some good methods to keep track of things. Journaling, photography, art, these are all great ways to keep track of your memories! I used to write about my dreams after I had them so I'd remember and what surprised me was how I had completely forgotten them when I reread my journal.
It was like I reading something written by someone else entirely!
if I get a concussion and forgot everything, I wouldn’t really be… well… “me” anymore
I get what you mean by this. It's been my theory for a while that your memories are "you", so it's no longer "you" if you lose even half of your memories. You're an entirely different person. Everything that we are, are contained in these memories. If you cloned a person then automatically, they will be a different person from the start. Simply because the memories they make will be different and are no longer identical. It's why I think if someone loses their memories through diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia, it's no longer "them".
Hell, every time you go to sleep, you will wake up an entirely different person. Ship of Theseus style. Your memories and even the cells in your body are slowly being replaced by new ones. So... in a way, every single second of our life, we are no longer the "me" that we were and we are now someone else.
It does seem like the eventual destination of any civilization to plug themselves into a simulation. Seeing that the universe expands at the speed of light, with our current understanding of physics and tech, we just simply wouldn't be able to expand as quickly as the universe did. So, we'd always be trapped in this bubble and unable to reach any further.
Why bother with all that trouble when you can be essentially gods in your own virtual reality simulation? You can have any life that you could possibly want in there if it was advanced enough.
This was my exact thought as well. There's really no reason why sufficiently advanced computers couldn't eventually simulate anything and everything. I'm going to go a bit off-topic but there's a theory about the simulation in The Matrix operating from a different set of laws from the real world. Hence the reason why humans can actually work as human batteries very efficiently compared to other forms of energy.
So, there's the possibility that if we are in a simulation then the "real world" might be operating by a different set of laws and physics to what we know in here. If that's the case then I really don't know where the limit actually is or how we could tell from inside here.
It isn't a cartoon like you specified, but it's one of the best Disney Channel shows of all time for me. Along with That's So Raven, Lizzie McGuire, Suite Life of Zack and Cody, etc. Just classics. If you're into cartoons, then Recess, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Kim Possible, The Power Puff Girls, Samurai Jack, Dexter's Laboratory, Ed, Edd & Eddy, all incredible shows and I used to watch them religiously!