instant life - just add water

One thing I've noticed about others my age - and me, actually, now that I'm growing older - is that we become less tolerant with many things and other people.

I think it's because we've paid our dues and we know our self-worth and we know what we deserve and what we don't. We've earned the right to be angry if we know we're justified in it, or to be happy because we deserve to be. And we can't understand when someone in his early 20s bitches and whines about things that mean the world to him at that particular moment, when we've already experienced the macrocosm of living, of laughing, and of suffering - and survived. What he is going through - with due respect to him, of course - is nearly nothing compared to what we have seen and experienced.

Some of us, by the time we're in our 40s and 50s, have experienced many things - seemingly bottomless passion, agonizing hunger, the pangs of love unrequited, the death of loved ones, betrayals, meeting others who have nothing compared to us and our own material possessions, debilitating illnesses. Perhaps we've even gone through such things as depression, substance abuse, physical and emotional abuse by someone we thought we could trust forever, abandonment, suicide attempts, and diseases that we nearly died from.

We are the edgy ones, the ones that teenagers and misguided romantic younger types fantasize about being.

And I wonder why they want to be us. I theorize that their desire may be a way for them to be human. They long to feel, to feel as deeply as they possibly can, to exist with meaning, but they want the instant-just-add-water version. Is that it? Or is it just fashion? Perhaps a combination of both?