Rebelling

"Stick it to the man!"
"Fight the power!
"Speaking truth to power."

It's called rebelling, and as a youth it was integral to your daily life. Every thing you did, say, and wore was for the purpose of rebelling. You didn't really examine why you were rebelling you just did it. It was the cool thing to do and to do otherwise put you at risk of being a conformist. And being a conformist was worse than anything even being a Waver.

However, when you're old rebelling loses all of its luster. It takes far too much energy, time, and commitment to pull off. It's easier to skip the rebelling and go shopping at Ikea. They have $100 couches.

Through experience you've come to learn that most of the stuff you rebelled against when you were young isn't really that bad now that you're old.

Basically, "The Man" isn't evil at all, just demanding and stinking of stale cologne. Sure, he can get a little grumpy at times, but at the end of the day he wants the same things you do: an iPhone and the chance to watch the Tori Spelling movie marathon on Lifetime.

When you're old and you come across young people rebelling and all you can do is smirk. You know that their rebelliousness is vapid, meaningless, and pretentious.

Age teaches that true rebellion is working with the machine, not raging against it, and true courage is cooperating with power, not fighting it.

Of course if the youth was to read this they'd just say it's propaganda from "The Man" and they would try to rebel against it. Then again that's what real conformists do.