“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”

The world is my oyster or so I keep being told.  I can do whatever I want with my life.  Our generation has endless fruit just waiting to be sampled from the opportunity tree but which will taste the sweetest?  Should I have a career or should I have children?  Perhaps I should get married or buy a house...but life's too short so maybe I should just spend my money on a year travelling around having experiences.  We're told to: enjoy the single life but find our soul-mate; wear trendy but classic clothes; eat, drink and be merry while staying thin.  According to modern culture; I can have it all if I want to.

Today I went to see 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.'  Before the film I sat through a reel of trailers and I felt mildly anxious because the new releases all looked so entertaining.  I started planning what I would go and see next.  That one...no that one...perhaps that one might be better....and all before I'd even seen the film I was there for.  There was a low-level concern that I might miss out, that life was too brief to get everything done.

You don't get salmon in the Yemen for a whole host of reasons, the main one being, you can't have everything.  Our generation are terrified of missing out, frozen by the fear of making the wrong choice and getting decision envy.  Put 10 twenty-somethings in a room and they will be taking a multitude of paths at a fast pace, all the while looking back to see if it's the right option.

Whilst I do agree this is an age thing, I also think it's just the way the world is now.  Life is a list of things to be ticked off; no longer a journey to be taken.  There's even a social network site where people can create and tick off their 'bucket list.'  I don't know if this is time-efficiency at it's best or an example of experience for experience's sake. There's a self-awareness that wasn't there before, an enlightenment of all the things on offer which has both positive and negative repercussions.

This feeling is magnified after an accident or illness, when you become aware of just how vulnerable you are and how fleeting life is.  You need to put things back into perspective.  There are some things you might have always wanted to do that you've been putting off; do them.  But there's lots of things that you didn't get around to doing, probably because you weren't really that bothered.  The first trick is to distinguish between these two; then choose what you're going to do and do it.  Stop going round and round in circles wondering if there's a better choice.  The second trick is to get to the cinema 15 minutes late post-trailers or order Sky+, so you can record everything on release.

http://bucketlist.org/  Resourceful or depressing?  You decide.
http://4020vision.com/ - Advice from 40-something women to 20-something women.  Same as above.

Title quote from 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Johnathan Safran Foer.