Utne Takes the Angst Out of Aging

The generation’s anthem was “Hope I die before I get old.” So it only figures that baby boomers have not hit middle age gracefully. Luckily, the January-February Utne Reader has arrived to chronicle the thirty- and fortysomething generation’s painful moment of reckoning with a package of 13 articles and accompanying pieces, titled: “What’s to Worry About Growing Older--and what’s so great about being young?”

Writer Joan Frank summarizes the problem: “Despite the number of boomers statistically sharing the event, hitting 40 remains a bewilderingly isolating feeling in a ruthlessly youthful culture.”

A Reader’s Digest for those who reached adolescence in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Utne Reader does a good job of pulling together ideas on the subject, making growing old seem like a communal activity. Drawing from the alternative press, books and original articles, the magazine actually finds cause for optimism in the fact that the nation’s largest demographic blip is at least halfway to being dead.

The lead article, an excerpt from Mark Gerzon’s book, “The Mid-Life Quest,” makes a compelling case for confronting aging head-on. Gerzon’s reflective, first-person analysis eventually bogs down in reheated psychobabble and fuzzy science. But along the way, he offers clear-headed insight: “We turn mid-life into a ‘mid-life crisis’ by pretending that everything is supposed to stay the same. But it isn’t.”

Elsewhere, Laurence Shames, in an article reprinted from the excellent New York weekly, “7 Days,” argues that as the baby boom generation matures and grows disenchanted with the culture it inhabits, it will again transform that culture.

In economic terms, Shames writes, boomers are “facing the daunting prospect of peaking at the same moment the country is.” But rather than simply resigning themselves to relative failure, they will change the definition of success, he believes. “One of the most quietly insidious things that has happened since last week when we were 30, is that the whole notion of ‘success’ has been deformed, denatured, drained of meaning.”

Fine. Swell. Except it seems to have been the boomers who Shames represents who did the deforming, whining all the while that the good life to which they feel entitled has been slow in arriving. About the second time Shames poses the rhetorical question, “Am I complaining?” readers will want to shout: “No! You’re sniveling!”

At one point, Shames intimates of his generation: “If we’ve learned anything, it’s that most things aren’t worth getting tired over.” His friends never go dancing any more, he confides.

But Shames and other ennui-addled middle-agers might be well advised to listen to what author Ashley Montagu has to say a few pages later on: “Most adults draw back from the unfamiliar, perhaps because they are reluctant to reveal ignorance, perhaps because they have become genuinely indifferent to the interesting experiences of life and consider that absorbing something new is simply too much trouble.”

Montagu’s antidote to this “psychosclerosis,” or “hardening of the mind,” is for adults to behave more like kids--to relearn the spontaneity, humor, honesty, and natural curiosity of childhood. Those who do, he writes, find that their later years are the happiest of their lives.

This juxtaposition of viewpoints is the Utne Reader’s greatest strength. When these packages work--as this one does--readers feel as if they’ve sat in on a rousing, late-night conversation between a group of informed, if somewhat unorthodox and cantankerous friends.

Oddly, Utne’s aging package makes no mention of what many boomers are finding a very significant--and annoyingly public--aspect of growing up: having kids. That matter is engagingly addressed, however, in three separate articles in the same issue.

Taking a feminist approach, the magazine concludes only that this parenthood business is problematic. As author Susan Shapiro summarizes, “As feminists we have a problem that’s not going to go away until we face it: the tension between women whose motherhood choices differ.”

The articles suggest sound reasons for women to have or not have kids. But the underlying message seems to be that procreation is politically uncool--a notion that seems to underlie what some observers see as the political Left’s subtle anti-family bias.

Without making the point directly, the arguments also point to a connection between the anti-family bias of middle-age hipsters and baby boom narcissism. Notice, for instance, the telling use of the generation’s most important word-- me --in this excerpt from a generally well-wrought piece by Roberta Joseph called “Deciding Against Motherhood: One Woman’s Story.”

“There are times when I feel painfully alienated from even my dearest friends, who now as parents inhabit a world I do not want to share. . . . They get up early and go to bed early, and of necessity have less time for me (emphasis added).”

The Lighter Side of Business Analysis

The January-February Harvard Business Review devotes 214 pages to serious analysis of the current business climate. But the two pages it gives to a less-than-serious look at magazines for the 1990s may be the most sobering analysis of all--at least if you take this sort of humor seriously. Among the publications listed: Barren, Misfortune, BusinessWeak, Divestor’s Daily, Working Child, and The Wall Street Shimbun.

RIZA Falls Short of Its Ambitions

The premiere issue of Pacific Rim RIZA--Reportage on Influence, Zest and Affluence--is on the stands, and unfortunately, seems destined to stay there. This ambitious bimonthly has tapped into what may become a good market niche, what with everyone Ping-Ponging from Asia to California and back.

But the magazine’s initial effort suggests that the editors have staked out much more turf than they know what to do with. The articles on actor Lou Diamond Phillips, Philippine leaders in exile, and other topics relevant to the Pacific Rim are passable, but predictable.

Readers can get an idea of how the copy reads by checking out the photo credits, which include such unbiased contributors as the Korean National Tourism Corp., Hong Kong Tourist Assn., Singapore Tourist Promotion Board, Warner Bros. and American Honda Motor Co.

(Pacific Rim RIZA, 6290 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, Calif. 90028 (213) 856-4823).