Ferris Bueller told us: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Oh, Ferris. You forgot to tell Generation X that sometimes we’ll need to stop and look around so this fast moving life doesn’t run over us like a truck.

When we’re young and immortal, we think life is all about experiences and catharsis and testing our limits. In other words, we’re stupid.

And now we live in a world where people think they’re entitled to render judgement on your past stupidity. That truck you get run over by is usually driven by people you know.

Because now that they’re older, deeply aware of their mortality, and realize that they haven’t achieved all that they thought they would (and probably never will), the only way they can recapture a few moments of “experience and catharsis” is usually at the expense of others. It’s amazing what having less time left than you’ve already lived makes you do.

Some people double mortgage their house, buy a Porsche, and start banging their assistant. Other’s overspend, or quit their jobs for no reason, or whatever. The menu of options is bigger than a Newport Beach “Build Your Own Bloody Mary” bar I once saw.

It’s really amazing how when the going gets tough we get to see who people really are–the ones whose eyes glaze over when they smell blood in the water and everyone in striking distance is just so much chum.

Oh, sure, they’ll self-justify with high flown abstract principles for faceless, nameless categories of people who may or may not exist. But again, here comes Albert Camus who warned us about the dehumanizing effects of “abstraction”.

The thing about abstracting to “principles” is that in human hands these “principles” always excuse us from our responsibility to the actual, real life people standing in front of us–the ones who are eye to eye with us, and that some of us gladly push aside or destroy so we can convince ourselves and anybody watching how we’re important, righteous, and that we mattered, before we close our eyes and nobody remembers who we were. All this to make the unbearable lightness of our obscurity less true. Because it hurts too much to admit it’s true.

But look what happens when we can’t.