Norm Geras had an interesting reflection on observing one's life while living it. In particular, he's noticed that as his life has progressed, in addition to enjoying or not enjoying particular things that happen to him, he's begun to get a baseline level of appreciation for having all his life experiences at all. He wonders whether it'd be better to get this appreciation earlier in life as (I take it) it adds something meaningful to going through life.
My inclination is to say it probably wouldn't, because that kind of appreciation requires a lot of comparative data that young people are unlikely to have, and their not having it is probably a good thing. The example that spurs Norm's reflection is a comment Martin Amis makes about going through life without his friend Christopher Hitchens. It's both a sensible example and the sort of thing people would be better off without: the recognition that having experiences on its own is valuable can only come when one has a finely-tuned sense of the alternatives: friends and family no longer around, or knowing the feeling of truly lacking in material of spiritual ways. Let the young be young, in other words, secure in the knowledge that life will drag them into maturity, and hopefully also some degree of reflectiveness, later on in life.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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