Un-Lived

Most people nowadays get so wrapped up in the 'things' they want or need or expect to achieve this elusive, insatiable facade of social acceptability that they forget who they are and what they are really all about. Just today my cousins and I were discussing how, increasingly marriage is becoming a matter of the right house, the right job and the right car...people get so caught up in all of this that they forget the precious little reasons they wanted to marry their spouses in the first place.
I feel so much young talent, vitality and energy gets sucked out of our community by this incredible pressure to conform and fit into this mould of banker, doctor, engineer... that even the handful of individuals who come back home looking to embrace something new and daring, soon give in to the pressure of our society's acceptable occupations and live their lives in quiet desperation.
This pursuit of a clone society seems to have left us without adventurers, without dreamers and explorers and artists. It seems have filled our ranks instead with the deep rooted dissatisfaction of lives left unlived, unexplored and dreams forgotten, unrealized.
Should, God forbid, anyone want to take a year off after college and go see the World our families and societies condemn them as lunatic, dropouts who will never amount to much, who are running astray and will never have a family of their own...why?
Is self discovery and the pursuit of personality so wrong?
What has this world come to when young people are required to stop dreaming, to stop aspiring to something greater, something new?
Will this world of ours ultimately kill the possibility of breaking new ground? Of growing and becoming? Of Living?
I must admit, this is a thought, a world, that terrifies me.
Cheers to all those out there living their dreams and hoping for something better.