If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed?
If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed?
Its the 14th century and you've had no time to prepare, after you're done reading this post you are snapped. What do you do?
If I snapped you back in time 650 years
2025 - 650 =1375
Its the 12th century
1375 is the 14th century. Which do you mean?
Answering the actual question, nothing good would come of it if my location on earth didn't change. Being the only white person in rural northern Japan well before Europeans came in the 1500s would probably not be a good situation for me. The language, at least the written one, was very different. Being the Nanboku-chō era, things would probably be not great since it was in the midst of 60ish years of war with two different people claiming to be in charge. I can't find, at least before my coffee kicks in, exactly what kinda state Mutsu Province, as it was then called, was in at the time.
Well, I would give you the answer, but since I snapped back as soon as I read the post, I'm now responding what has been 650 years later for me, and I'm too fucking old for this shit a second time. I bypassed getting snapped back this time by just not reading the post and coming straight in to comment.
Now, what will happen if I read the
I'm on the Gregorian calendar, 650 years ago is the year 1375. I'm in North Carolina, so if I were to snap back in time at my present location I would be a blue eyed white guy in pre-contact North America. And while I think I'm an above average candidate for the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court scenario I'm not realistically able to start "from scratch." I'd probably make it the summer on forage and my own body fat. I don't picture encountering the natives going particularly well, for me or them. I'm not sick and I'm vaccinated against a lot of shit but watch I'll give them 6 centuries worth of influenza updates.
I don't think it would help that much being plunked down in 14th century England; we're talking Geoffrey Chaucer's lifetime here, to them I'd sound insane. Modern English is a few hundred years off. If they didn't trepan me to let the demons out of my skull and I didn't die of smallpox, I'd try to invent the electric motor 500 years early and be burned for heresy or some shit.
Die because my medications haven’t been invented yet.
Or be murdered because I’m not christian
You would die. There are many, many examples of explorers from “advanced” civilizations getting shipwrecked or stranded in an area where primitive hunter-gatherers live. Unless they are saved by the hunter gatherers, they are doomed, despite their knowledge of science and technology. Joseph Henrich talks extensively about these examples in his book, “The Secret of Our Success”
Check out this video to get an idea -> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jaoQh6BoH3c
If I time traveled to the same geographical region, considering I'm in South Brazil, if I don't get immediately killed by some jungle animal or tropical disease, I'd probably end up starting a pandemic among the natives.
I'm in the US and in a place that native Americans didn't have settlements. I'm very familiar with the area and have hunted, hiked, and camped here my entire life. With no preparation or modern equipment I give myself about a week before I get eaten by wolves or a bear, maybe gored by an elk or bitten by a venomous snake. I don't expect that I would see another human during that week. Native hunting parties visited the area so it's not impossible that I would see someone but it's very unlikely.
It's 1375 and I'm asphyxiating somewhere in the Milky Way about 600 light years from Earth.
But let's assume that somehow my latitude, longitude and altitude relative to Earth somehow remain the same. Now I'm spawning several feet in the air probably in sight of several villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll think I was sent by God. If not I'm gonna have a real bad time. There's a good chance I'll break a bone in the fall, and that's not going to go well at all.
But let's assume there are trees here. Lots of them. That's actually pretty likely. They hide my sudden appearance and mitigate bone breakages.
Now I'm on the outskirts of a village, battered and bruised and very strangely dressed. I don't speak any language they'll understand despite technically being from that area. Middle English is the language of the day, and I speak something that won't evolve for at least another 200-250 years. Shakespeare is technically modern English and is hard to comprehend sometimes. Here we're talking Chaucer and that's pretty much opaque.
I'm literate, but not in Latin, and that's the language of the Church. I'm numerate, but they haven't got beyond Roman numerals yet.
I'm not even sure where the church is. I know where it is in the modern day, but that building's no more than 200 years old. Maybe it's on the same site. I'd head there for shelter at least.
I know the Lord's Prayer in modern English. Chanting that quietly might spark some recognition in anyone present but then it might count as blasphemy to say it in anything other than Catholic-Church-approved Latin.
Come to think of it, I could probably blow a couple of minds by writing the alphabet they know and then the same with the extra letters that have been added since.
And then I'd be burned as a witch.
612 years in the past
In Brazil. So almost a century before the first europeans landed here. I'm assuming I just plop exactly in my relative earth-location, but in the distant past. (... It would be really funny if this was overly literal, because I'm currently in the 12th floor, so I'd thanos snap into the past and immediately fall to my death)Well
As a person from modern times -- From AFTER the Americas came into contact with Europe, if I went near a person here in the Land of Palms (that's what the natives called Brazil!) from those times we'd both get horribly infected and die a lot due to how antibodies work. Viruses did a lot of the legwork in genociding the natives. Euros would deliberately do things to infect natives so they'd die of illness.
The place I currently live in is slowly turning into a desert, but was a deep jungle back then (... It was still a deep jungle in the 1910s tbqh).
.......... I think I'd just die? Become food for a jaguar or eat a poisonous fungus or sth.
Would love to indulge in the fantasy of giving the Guarani people guns and a warning to shoot white people on sight just to see how history would change, but that ain't happening.
Wait 612 years and buy Microsoft.
Try to find the nearest shaman, apothecary or herbalist and trade my future clothes/pocket contents for some hallucinogens and painless poison. I ain't living through a time before electricity.
I reread the Bitcoin paper yesterday, so with my newly refreshed knowledge id find the nearest mathimation, explain it to them, implement the protocol with paper records, handwritten hashes, and messages on horseback or something. After a few years when every major economic power realizes how valuable a deflationary currency that Mansa Musa doesn't control (14th century african gold-salt bazzilionare, ~400 bill USD today), the price of my currency would increase vastly, making me super rich.
Wouldn't I be in like empty space?
I'd die pretty quickly.
This is something I often wonder about, what could one person even do with all of today's common knowledge? You can't very well just invent the printing press and have the same impact as Gutenberg - you need something what the few people who can read would, and most people can't translate the bible from Latin into renaissance German and/or don't know enough about the catholic church to write scathing remarks on it like Luther.
You can write and read - that's something. Maybe more importantly, you can do math with arabic numerals - boom, easy accounting job. With a bit higher education, you may even just invent calculus once more. You know how long it took for people to figure out you can put pi on the number line? Proving all the formulas in your head is the hard stuff, but you have a head start just by knowing them. We all clown on the wormhole explanation with the paper, but it does prove Euclid wrong 400 years early.
Ah, and you can just become a medical genius by using soap and bandages - "do no harm" is better than most.
Nobody would be able to understand me because English has diverged so far from 12th century English that it's a different language. Also I'd be in north America where nobody had even seen a white person. Additionally, I'm 20 ft above the ground right now in a building that didn't exist back then. Finally, I'd be rightfully blamed for bringing plague to the native tribes of the area and likely killed.
Assuming those hurdles were all cleared: I'm a mechanical engineer. So, I'd tell the natives where iron ore, coal, and oil was buried and how to extract and refine it. Tell them how to make gunpowder. Speed run making steam engines and lathes. Get north american natives armed, industrialized, and organized against the external European threat.
I'd make some fucking soap.
Fuck you buddy, I'm barely getting by with modern medicine, you just ended me.
Many years ago when I thought about this, I realised I wouldn't be able to put much of my modern knowledge and skills to use. I decided I'd learn to make basic matches by distilling urine into phosphate, which wasn't invented until the 19th century, but I've forgotten the process. Collect lots of urine and boil it? Also, if you make white phosphate it can cause horrific toothache and they have to remove your jaw... So, I'm hoping another commentor will suggest a safer skill I can brush up to be ready for travel.
Unfortunately in that circumstance, I'd likely be a horrible vector for disease. Not much chance of survival if I spread devastation wherever I go.
Die a slow death from hyperglycemia once my pump runs out of insulin.
Infect the indigenous population with some god awful pathogen they have no defense against.
Die to a pathogen I have no defense against.
Die to the indigenous population due to being a white dude in pre-contact North America.
It uh... wouldn't be pretty.
Probably die
Basic geography could go a long ways, if people believe you. At this point people were exploring the world trying to find the spice Islands, but didn't know WTF they were doing. Magellan navigating the strait that would be named after him was impressive at its time, but now we know the best way from Europe to Asia (and spices and stuff) by sea without any modern canals is by going around Africa. Like, it still sucks and it's a long trip but it's doable compared to going to damn near Antarctica.
This assumes I don't die, can communicate, and am not in the then-unpopulated (and quite landlocked) current location of Denver, Colorado.
Edit: bonus fact: if a sailor managed to smuggle a knapsack full of cloves back, it was worth about as much a house
I would die quickly because I don't have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.
For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don't. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don't have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You'd probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There's very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.
England is in the midst of the Hundred Years war with France and considering I'm ~193cm and the average height of a man in England in the 14th century is about 171cm... looks like in getting my arse drafted and shipped off to France, to act as some kind of intimidating presence. That is until I have to swing a sword, which my body, that's used to sitting in an office looking over excel spreadsheets, absolutely can't do, so I get bum rushed/hit in the face with an arrow and die.
That's the most likely scenario.
Worst case scenario, considering I don't speak middle English or Latin, I'm treated as an enemy and locked up in a dungeon somewhere.
I don't think there is realistically a best case scenario
Use all the science i know from school to helpfully quicken scientific progress and spread trans propaganda
Hope that I don't start the early spread of New World diseases to indigenous Americans
And I'd be dead by the end of the week
I don't think I know a single language from the time, so I'm probably getting murdered because I'm a strange foreigner who can't defend themselves with words.
That’s 1375.
Not good, not bad. Depends on where you ended up on the globe. There absolutely is civilization, but it’s all kings and Tsars and the like. The English and French Hundred Years War is winding down but the plague really did a number on Europe. Lots of war in India. It wasn’t a great time in the Middle East what with the Crusades and all. The Egyptians are conquering Armenia. The Songhai Emprire is growing in Eastern Africa. Southeast Asia had a lot of conquest and a large kingdom growing, might not have been so bad as long as you landed on the winning side. The Ming Dynasty just started in China.
So it’s not like you ended up in pre-civilization or among dinosaurs or something. There are plenty of people around, but it’s still an age of war and conquest. Your best bet to have a great life would be to ally yourself with a strong leader and give them advancements to help that leader “win”. Of course, if he were defeated, you’d be slowly tortured and killed by the opposing side.
650 years ago, the place I live was inhabited mostly by the Ojibwe (a Native American people), so I suppose I'd try to find some of them and try to convince them to not kill me and let me stick around long enough to learn their language. Then I could teach them some of my knowledge. Maybe by the time the Europeans come along they'll be a bit more prepared.
If I can't find anyone, I don't like my chances of surviving for any significant amount of time. Maybe I could make it a few weeks foraging for food and fishing or something, but realistically I'll probably end up starving.
I'd be fucked. I'm not succeeding in the present, I see 0 reason to believe that would be different in 1375.
First I would seek the attention of the local ruler by cooking interesting dishes with modern knowledge.
Then I would ask him to create an akademy. I don't know the details but I know what can be known. Intelligent people will reinvent the knowledge.
Some side businesses should make enough money that the akademy and thus further development doesn't entirely rely on the king.
Build cities with public transport and no cars, because there is no car.
Success.
find the nearest sword and belly flop on its pointy side
I'd try and hold my breath to not set off the European diseases into America early.
Do my best to warn the locals of the coming invasion. Learn their language and teach them English and tell them not to trust any group of strangers who speak it.
Help improve their technology as best I can. I’m not sure how much I’d be able to improve it. At least, teach them to wear masks and wash their hands when around sick people.
Edit: I’m taking the middle road here and assuming something around year 1250 or so, not 1100 or 1400 as confusingly set in OP.
Okay, so unlike most other scenarios, I think I would be fine for a while at least. The peoples living where I live would have made and kept more or less regular contact with the sons of bitches from the south that would later crusade us (or I think maybe one of the crusades is presently ongoing at the time…) so while I would both introduce and be hit with diseases or more likely strains of familiar ones new to my body/their bodies, I think it wouldn’t be as destructive as entirely separated landmasses like America vs Europe.
So if I survive the shock my body gets hit with, and I don’t kill everyone around me, I think I would be fairly well received. As far as I’ve read, the languages and dialects were different than after the formalization of the written form, and at this time these lands were just starting to get forced under Swedish rule, so with my basic understanding of Swedish and of course my native language, I think I would be able to communicate well enough to not get instantly killed as a demon or something.
I think my best bet would be to introduce myself as some sort of demi-god, a bastard son of the god of forests and the hunt probably, which would hopefully explain my alien attire and materials used to make them. And the alien accent/dialect of both the local language or Swedish, depending on where I’d land. If the first contact I make aren’t local but crusaders, I suppose I’d have to try and push myself as a wandering preacher of Christ or something. I’d have to hope they’d speak Swedish, since I do not know German well enough to form two words together, and they’d likely be the next likely encounters. Novgorodians I think were fine with the Swedish language in general, so if our current knowledge of history was off enough that I’d meet them here, I’d still be fine. No idea what I’d pretend to be to them though. My limited knowledge of history doesn’t help there. But as far as I understand, they were sort of a melting pot of close-by cultures, and not so focused on these lands at this time, they’d just take me for a local hermit and let me run off clumsily.
If I was able to survive the first encounters and get myself to a village or a hillfort, I’d try and establish myself as a wise one, helping with calculations and engineering and whatnot to the best of my capabilities, which I would think honestly should far exceed those of the locals at the time. So maybe I’d get by just for being useful and knowledgeable.
But I don’t think I’d live a long life. These were a turbulent and violent time and one village elder or the other, fancying themself a king or whatever, would just send assassins to off me for being an asset for the local leader where I’d end up in.
Even if I’d travel to avoid this problem, it probably wouldn’t take until my old ages to have someone or something off me just by happenstance. And I wouldn’t want to live a hermit in a time where internet or computers aren’t a thing. I think the only way to cope would be to focus on a family, try and bring up children and have that fulfill my life as best it can, as long as it can.
Honestly, I consider myself lucky in this scenario. We still have our language alive and in use, the same the locals would speak at that time. This together with the general superstitious nature of the local tribes — which the crusades and Christianity, with overt blood and sadistic violence, would (thankfully later, I hope for my sake here, at least according to our current knowledge) succeed in some amount to water down and turn them to its specific flavor of lame ass superstition — would make it probably at least somewhat likely I wouldn’t be killed on sight or something to that effect.
I become a scribe or accountant, since I can write cursive, do math, and know some Latin.
There was a monastery within walking distance of my home at that time, so that's where I'd head first.I'm in Japan and while I can speak modern Japanese I don't know shit about classical Japanese so I'd be screwed. I'm also not Japanese so good chance I end up getting killed or some shit
First off. Do I get to bring stuff with me? Like say the entire printed off contents of wikipedia.
also, I would like find one or two things that hadn't quite been invented yet and 'invent' it.
also, Also, with a modicum of military power, I'd probably start a religion.
This assumes I have time to learn the local dialect
I don't have the knowledge to survive in the 12 century so either some Native Americans find me and are kind enough to teach me to survive
Or I just die.
Good thing I binge isekai anime
Probably not the answer you thought, but succeed by knowing there are wild animals that could easily kill me. It's either I die by that, or wait until the lack of my blood thinners kills me, sl I'd definitely take the quicker death than the slower one.
I don't know how to refine oil, but knowing that its refinable into diesel/gasoline is a pretty good start to looking for it. Steam power easier to figure out. A head start on murdering some sperm whales for lighting industry seems easy enough to figure out. Partnering with metal smiths who might have a clue on making gun barrels, and pipe's in general that could be used for advanced weaponry, would be an easy path to get governments to give me a ton of money for weapons research by just showing them some drawings. Doesn't really matter if I ever figure out how to do it, just the vision of what is possible would make me richer than Musk. Richer if I can help enslave all of humanity to one empire.
Basically start digging my grave, wondering if I'm gonna die from my asthma or my dermatitis first in that era. I'm betting on my asthma.
Try to use some type of boiling water technique to invent drinkable sanitary drinking water that doesn't get me drunk (might not be necessary in some parts of Asia)
Most parts of the world that is not North America: try to convince some wealthy persons and bar owners to sponsor me to getting a bunch of bread molds and rats/mice, possibly even pigs, to conduct antibiotics and vaccine research, otherwise I might die from random sources...
Not sure if I could reasonably do those given my limited biology knowledge, but I guess they are worth trying. Besides that I'd just try to be less blunt/offensive so I don't get sent to jail and try to live my best life I guess
The Ring of Fire series which is about this concept was such an amazing read. Unfortunately the infinite branching plotlines became way more than I could handle.
650 years ago this place was a sea. So I’d end up having to swim at least a couple of kilometers. Considering the current sea temperatures, I’d probably die of hypothermia before I could reach the shore.
There's a former nunnery down the road. I suppose I'd try to join. Or maybe find a farmer who's looking for someone to look after his kids because his third wife died in childbirth.
Depends what clothes I'm wearing when it happens.
If I'm wearing anything that could remotely be seen as fancy back then (which I mean a lot of modern clothes could pass off as), since I'm near the ocean, I'd immediately run into the water not seeing anyone, and then pretend I'm a royal foreigner who ended up shipwrecked. Since I usually wear a watch, have a tungsten (Wolfram) crystal wedding band as well, that would help me in passing off as royalty as well. This is assuming the people helping me aren't brigands. There's things we do and know of that we take for granted that could be used to pass off as someone upper class too, like reading.
Then next steps would be to get to an aristocrats home, and eventually I'd imagine somewhere where I could work with scholars so they can teach me the language and we can work on translation so we can understand each other. Would have to be extremely careful of smallpox during all this of course.
Once we could, that's when I'd finally whip out my phone to trusted scholars and pull up my survival books, books on plumbing, etc specifically, and to explain that this is a special metal and glass book that can hold many books that's common in the land I'm from, and that I can teach them how to build them. But that we'd need to build plumbing because I'd like a shower by then.
This is very A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur's_Court
I hated that book. So pretentious.
Well I be naked, so would need to make/steal clothing very quickly
Well, I'm in America, so...
I guess I'd prep the natives to help put up a proper fight. Find a way to teach them that white people (like myself) carry diseases and to stay away and keep them away. If they land on your shores, drive them back. Never let them get a foothold. I'd try to convince them that I was a demon that got away from the other demons to warn of our coming.
I'd do my best to make it so nobody remembered the name Christopher Columbus except as the idiot that died because he thought the world was much smaller than it is and never returned from his voyage.
I'm building a boat to go find the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria to sink them real good. Then nuke China and Ruzzia at their palaces. Same to every "kingdom". That's what they all deserve. Complete erasure from history. Instead people would just know that there used to be an asshole who wanted everyone to work and give him all the money.
I would basically become a Jewish witch and either build a small community of people or die of some ancient plague, either way I wouldn't be thriving but I might just survive.
Well, staying in the same location? I'm in the US, so... I'd probably try to get writing invented. To my knowledge, besides some of the Central American empires, there's no evidence or even claim of there having been any kind of writing or system for making information durable. I know there's a lot of clay here, I'm pretty sure we could bake clay tablets to store down information. There's also tule reeds here that were already being extensively used, and those could probably be made into a kind of paper as well. As to whether the people would accept that, I have no fucking idea at all; what we know of the California tribes suggests they were always semi-nomadic, but that's all very well into the post-contact period and much of what we know was written down by the Spanish while being the biggest bastards they possibly could to the locals. I dunno how useful record-keeping would be to a nomadic people. It's also entirely possible the people would be like "uh, yeah, we know how to write, dummy", and it was just lost in the multiple waves of pandemics.
I think probably something that -might- be achievable is figuring out glass. I'm mostly sure that if the native Americans had glass, we would have seen some sign of it in the archeological record by now. I'm sure some smarty pants is going to come along and tell me "you can't just throw sand in a kiln and make glass, you need a special kind of sand blah blah blah and here's 99 reasons why that won't work". Yeah, you're probably right, but I don't know any better, so I'd still definitely try. I also remember reading that clear glass was a thing figured out near Venice when they started adding grass ash or some shit to the sand, so I'd definitely experiment with that, too. Glass is just dead useful -and- pretty, so I'm fairly confident I'd get some acceptance that way.
I would say metal smithing, but the only metal deposits nearby that I know of are mercury and gold. You can't make nails and tools out of mercury and gold.
Also, maybe water wheels? To my knowledge, we have no record of native Americans using water wheels for work (I.e. grinding corn or acorns into flour). I think if I managed to put a basic water wheel together, I'd be pretty popular.
I guess I could make a name as a mathematician, though that'd depend where the fuck I'm snapped to.
I'd like to warn the Incas to not trust anyone with white skin, kill them all on sight and NEVER let any of them get within 100km of Potosi, but I don't think I'd be anywhere near the Andes either way.
I'd cry, curse god's name even more than I do currently, and then probably die from boredom.
1375? Bro that's the. Middle ages. Fucking kill me.
I could probably discover electricity, depending on where I landed. Jewelers of the time could make wire, copper was common, and magnets (lodestones) had been discovered. Realistically though I'd be a dumb giant (ie, speak no known languages of the time and statistically I'd have like a foot on the "tall" people of the era). I'd probably try to find some party trick that looked like magic to people of the era then hope that people would welcome and try to integrate me rather than burning me as a witch. Then I'd probably die in a week or two anyway to some disease lol
- establish a new culture in the Americas that will unify and kill European settlers on sight.
- teach the native Americans about the future they're preventing
- teach them European science, politics, history, economics, etc
- give them a technological advantage that will set them ahead of Europe by 650 years by teaching them manufacturing skills.
basically, I want to destroy white colonialism. we have a toxic culture that honestly doesn't deserve to exist on a planet it wants to destroy.
I'm also curious to see how North America would turn out after 650 years have passed after I have achieved my goals.
I would make an IT startup.
Start making siege weapons.
I'm doing pretty good then. Where I live has been so historically abundant in resources that people were able to just sort of vibe.
I would also establish a calendar, convey it to the locals, and warn them of what is to come along with a timeline.
I'd go live in a cabin in the forest, again.
1375? Die from malaria, I guess? Be eaten by an alligator? Or oh no, hasten the demise of the Tocobaga with my exotic biology? Either they would kill me or get me sick, or vice versa. Also, fall on my ass when my house disappeared.
I would follow the river to the bay, I guess, and see if I could find anyone, or anything I might be able to eat.
I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.
They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it themselves.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery (unlike the Olhone), so I’d probably be best off staying put.
Clearly I am OVERprepared for this with my VAST knowledge of Doctor Who. And nothing else.
Get to smelting!
Well, I know about hygiene about various diseases, and even how to treat them. I'm also running for my life to the nearest forest, as I don't have any way to prove I'm not a Vagabound or invader, and I can't communicate.
There's no choice but to try to hide deep inside a forest, and try to find a river or lake. I would eventually be forced to drink dirty, risking parasites, unless I get lucky enough to find what I need to purify it.
As soon as that is taken care of, I would focus on covering up my tracks, digging some sort of shelter to hide from medieval people, my next step would be to ensure a food source like fishing, or finding plants I recognize as edible, which might be where I mess up and die (A lot of plants look similar to poisonous ones, mushrooms too).
Next step would be making bog iron, finding copper, and so on, to make life easier at first, but then to defend myself against being discovered.
Let's skip the "I have no basic survival skills" part (also skipping disease) and assume we find a nearby group of humans. If you approach first contact carefully they'd probably let you live with them in exchange for labor, giving you time to learn the language.
I think I have enough ambient exposure to modern technology that I could contribute at least 3-4 major innovations to my group over a couple decades. The challenge would be conveying and implementing ideas more than remembering them. You're not going to get back to modern standards of living in your remaining time traveled years no matter how much you remember, but what little you can impart to others would earn your keep.
I don't know what all the innovations would be, but germ theory and pasteurization come to mind.