If you could go back in time, what would you change? I have already taken that one seriously and found the premise collapsing under its own weight — you don’t actually have access to the past you’d be fixing. The superpower question is the other classic, and it looks easier: no physics to argue with, no information theory to invoke, just a straight ask. If you could have any power, what would you choose? People answer it at parties without thinking twice. Flight, usually. Invisibility, if they’re being honest about themselves. Mind-reading, if they’re not being honest about anything else. But the question is not really testing your imagination. It is testing your relationship to reality — what you think is wrong with it, and what kind of fix you’ve decided is plausible.

I. The Question That Is Not Really About Power

Treated as a game, the superpower question asks what kind of person you’d become without ordinary limits. Answered honestly, it asks something else: what do you believe power is for, and what do you believe reality is refusing you. Every answer smuggles in a diagnosis. Flight is an answer from someone who feels grounded. Invisibility is an answer from someone who feels watched. Strength is an answer from someone who feels overpowered. The fantasy is never neutral, because the thing you’d escape from is the same thing you’d have to name if you were asked directly, and naming it directly is harder.

That makes the question less a fantasy about mastery than a confession about dependence. It asks whether you would like to be released from the ordinary conditions of a life — from effort, uncertainty, vulnerability, the slow work of becoming someone who can live inside reality instead of redesigning it. The point isn’t to answer cleverly. The point is to notice what the fantasy is doing while you answer.

II. The Sky Man Grants Wishes

George Carlin worked out the mechanics of this exact bargain, though he was aiming at religion rather than comic books. In the routine on prayer from his special You Are All Diseased, later collected in Napalm & Silly Putty, Carlin describes an invisible man who lives in the sky and watches everything you do, every minute of every day — and who has a list of ten things he does not want you to do, and if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke, where he will send you to burn and suffer forever. But he loves you. And he needs money. So he tells you to send him money, and if you don’t, he’ll get you. Carlin’s punchline is that he gave up praying to the invisible man and started praying to Joe Pesci instead, because Joe Pesci looks like a guy who could get things done.

Strip out the theology and what’s left is the structure the superpower fantasy shares with prayer: a request addressed to something outside the self, asking it to do the work that effort, negotiation, and time would otherwise have to do. The superpower version doesn’t even need an intermediary. You skip the middleman and just become the thing that grants wishes. But the shape of the wanting is identical — a shortcut around the friction of being a person with limited leverage in a world that doesn’t automatically arrange itself around your preferences. Carlin’s joke works because everyone recognizes the bargain instantly. Fewer people notice they’re still making it when the object of the wish is a cape instead of a favor from God.

III. Ressentiment, or the Politics of the Fantasy

Nietzsche had a name for the psychology that manufactures a fantasy of power instead of exercising an actual one: ressentiment, the topic of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. His concern was moral inversion — how the powerless recast their own powerlessness as virtue — but the underlying mechanism generalizes past ethics. When direct action toward what you want is unavailable, the psyche doesn’t simply give up wanting it. It builds an imaginative structure where the want is satisfied by other means: in reversed values, in revenge fantasy, in — for the purposes of a party game — capes.

This is where the fantasy stops being idle and starts being informative about material conditions, including mine. I do not want a superpower, and one honest reason is that I have rarely needed to fantasize my way around an obstacle I could not otherwise face — not because I am unusually capable, but because the terrain I walked was mostly paved before I arrived. That is a privileged position from which to find the fantasy uninteresting. Someone navigating real scarcity, real danger, real powerlessness in the Nietzschean sense doesn’t typically reach for flight or invisibility when asked what they’d want; they reach for rent, or a diagnosis, or a visa, or a night without fear — concrete, specific, achievable-in-principle things, which is exactly why the abstraction of the superpower fantasy is itself a luxury good. The freedom to want something metaphorical is downstream of not urgently needing something literal.

IV. What the Fantasy Teaches You to Want

Slavoj Žižek has a formulation, developed across his film and lecture work, that fantasy is not primarily what lets you satisfy a desire — it is what teaches you how to desire in the first place. The object doesn’t come first with the fantasy built around it; the fantasy structures what counts as an object worth wanting. Applied here: the superpower you’d choose is not discovered by introspection, the way you might discover a favorite color. It is assembled out of whatever your particular life has taught you counts as an intolerable limitation and a satisfying reprieve from it. Two people facing structurally similar constraints can generate entirely different fantasies, because the fantasy is downstream of the specific story each of them has been telling themselves about what is wrong.

That is why the more interesting question isn’t which power you’d pick. It’s why you keep being able to answer the question at all — what inventory of frustration you’re drawing on, and how quickly your mind reaches for exemption over negotiation. The habit of reaching for the exemption is the tell. It shows up in the same shape whether the object is a cape or a policy: the belief that a sufficiently powerful instrument would make the underlying problem legible and solvable, when the underlying problem is usually social, historical, or relational, and instruments — magical or technical — routinely fail to touch that layer at all.

V. The Unspectacular Alternative

None of this is an argument against wanting things, or against the pleasure of the game itself, which is real and mostly harmless at a party. It’s an argument for noticing what kind of wanting it is. The superpower fantasy and its cousins — utopian politics, messianic movements, the conviction that the next tool will finally make life legible — share a single structure: reality is experienced as an obstacle course that a sufficiently dramatic intervention could simply step outside of. But reality doesn’t yield to interventions of that shape. It yields to attention, to the slow accumulation of competence, to living inside conditions you didn’t design and mostly can’t escape.

So: no cape, no invisibility, no wish granted by an invisible man or a Sicilian stand-in. Just the room I already have, unchanged by the fantasy of it becoming radiant, and the unglamorous work of learning to want what’s actually available to build.

Further reading