Oh, Grow Up! : The Baby Boomers Are Freaking Out Over the Inevitable Passage of Time

May you stay/Forever young “Forever Young,” Bob Dylan (1978) His Aquarian-length gray hair stuffed into a blue sterile cap, Newport Beach infertility specialist Lawrence Werlin is singing as he performs an egg retrieval in a music-filled operating room. It is a drizzly morning in early fall, and the nurse had suspected it would be an Eagles kind of day. But it is a Rolling Stones kind of day.

The patient, a married woman in her mid-30s, desperately wants a child. The anesthesiologist, 39, a weary man who says he is depressed, dreams of becoming a personal trainer. Werlin, 43, a doctor with a wife, three children and a CD in his Porsche, is in his element, earning his reputation as the “Elvis of Infertility.”

“She’s a ho-o-o-o-onnnnky tonk wo-man!” Werlin croons as he watches his own progress with the needle on a sonogram machine. “Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues. . . .”

He looks at the semiconscious woman on the table, the IV anesthetic dripping into her vein. “Susie, you’re looking great, kid!”

“You want to hear some Eagles?” the nurse asks her, then adds encouragingly, “Say yes.” The patient blinks her eyes. The nurse changes the CD. Werlin continues singing, “Raven hair, ruby lips. Sparks fly from her fin-ger-tips.”

The doctor came of age in the ‘60s--a period he calls a “time of awakening”--when he learned there was a world outside of himself. He grew his hair long then and has cut it only once since, when he was a medical student and hospital administrators thought patients wouldn’t understand. His idol is Mick Jagger, whose wrinkled face above a studded leather jacket sneers out from a poster at the hopeful women who pass through his office.

As the doctor sings, the follicles collapse, the eggs are sucked out and whisked to the lab to be fertilized in a petri dish and returned the next day--as embryos, the patient hopes, which in the best of all technical worlds will develop into a baby. As the hourlong procedure comes to an end, Werlin begins to harmonize, putting a little whine into his voice: “Thought by nooooow, you’d re-a-lize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes. . . .” Without missing a beat, he switches to his doctor voice: “Let me check your vagina.”

The woman is checked and wheeled out. Werlin takes off his cap, shakes his shaggy mane loose and shuffles out to face the day singing his signature song: “Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses. . . .”

Hope I die before I get old/T-talkin’ ‘bout my generation “My Generation,” The Who (1965) If we were, say, Druze villagers in the Middle East, we would greet midlife with serenity and grace. No matter that our bodies wrinkle and sag, our hair turns white or succumbs to male-pattern baldness, we could still expect to attain positions of respect and power. The men would give up tobacco, wear special garb, go to the hilltop daily and speak to God. The women would supervise their daughters-in-law, perhaps even their husband’s concubines.

But, in fact, we are baby boomers in postmodern America--the most populous, schooled, indulged, narcissistic and persistently adolescent generation in American history. What we do is look in the mirror and say, “Omigod, this can’t possibly be happening to me.”

We buy $2,000 bicycles and sign up for same-gender groups that emulate tribal Indians. We quit law practices to become citrus farmers. We stop taking birth-control pills and start expensive surgical interventions so we can conceive. We strut and fret about our clothes and anxiously watch Mick and Cher to see if they look silly yet. Or, we avoid the entire issue with a variety of obsessions while lecturing our children on the dangers of excess.

Until now, boomers have never known anything other than a pervasive youth culture. “They grew up in a time when everybody was young,” says University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz. “The baby boom was twice as big as the generation that preceded it. It’s like a deer going through a boa constrictor. You don’t notice anything the snake ate before or after. They’ve been the biggest game in town and will be until they die.”

But there is a positive side to the boomers’ obsession with themselves. Schwartz notes that the generation’s self-affirming attitude reflects a healthy reaction to the retreating fathers and self-denying mothers they tended to grow up with. Still, she says, “It’s extraordinary how they have continued, have been encouraged, to live a lifestyle that for all intents and purposes couldn’t be distinguished from (that of) people 20 years their junior.”

Every generation undergoes some sort of midlife passage, a recognition of one’s mortality and limitations. But like everything else boomeresque, ours will surely go down as the biggest and the weirdest. Our future, unlike those of previous generations, has always seemed an endless road of wonderful possibilities, enhanced by fulfilling side trips. We have delayed duty, responsibility and commitment. We have dieted, jogged and exercised so much we look and actually think we are five to 10 years younger then we are.

Now, the illusions are wearing thin. According to Rutgers University demographer James W. Hughes, the core of the midlife transition for boomers is “facing up to reality.” Already, the possibility of death has hit home--particularly for those affected by AIDS or those whose parents have died.

Experts say that, for most boomers, this realization could not be happening at a worse time. The economy is in decline. Our children need to go to college. Our parents, who as a group are living longer than any other, may need care. Relationships between the sexes are at an all-time low.

“There is a loss of the future,” says David Gutmann, a Chicago psychologist and author of “Reclaimed Powers,” a cross-cultural look at aging. “It’s particularly tough for baby boomers who grew up in a time when the future was open, when they could be and do anything they wanted. Now, the future is closing in, the options are limited. At best, the future is a recap of the not-so-wonderful present. All that makes (boomers) particularly vulnerable to midlife shifts.

“In midlife, it will be brought home that everything is not possible,” Gutmann says, “that they have made their choices, and they will have to live with them. This is not a generation who wanted to feel they made final choices about anything. You thought you were keeping everything open, not making any final commitments to anything--marriage or a mate. Whatever you are now, wherever you are, you’re probably stuck.”

As a result, he says, we will see “a lot of rather frantic flailing.”

All boomers, regardless of race, class or gender, are feeling the chill, and surveys indicate that all groups are becoming predictably conservative, says RAND Corp. demographer Peter Morrison. “The question is, will middle age change them predictably, or will baby boomers thoroughly transform what middle age is, because they will be so different in how they behave?” he wonders.

Take, for example, a 39-year-old former securities broker we’ll call “Mick.” He progressed through life nonstop from college to law school to business school, believing in BMWs, business suits and beepers. He worked 12 hours a day for 10 years and bought a glorious suburban mansion for himself and his family on an Orange County ranch tract.

Then, at 36, his already thinning hair became patchy. To him, balding was “a sign of weakness. I didn’t want to be perceived as a person with an open wound,” he says. The hair thing made him consider his own mortality. “When you look down that long tunnel and start seeing a door at the end, there are basically two ways to go,” he says. “You can remarry some young girl who makes you feel good, or you can resign yourself to aging with dignity.” Or you can take a $50,000 detour, as he did, and go for a brow lift and four painful hair surgeries, change careers, write a screenplay about “finance and romance” and buy a Harley to ride down the Sunset Strip, needless to say, without a helmet. “I was approaching middle life,” Mick says. “Now I think I’m not.”

Today he can pass for someone in his late 20s. Yet, when he’s in their company, as one of them, 20-year-olds strike him as, well, young. “I think, ‘This guy has a lot to learn.’ ” But for the first time, secretaries who used to call him “sir” now spend extra time flirting, and he says he’s tempted to stray. Now his wife wants plastic surgery, too.

Already, 21 million boomers have passed age 40, with another 56 million to go. We are a third of the population, and by the turn of the century will comprise half the work force. Demographically speaking, baby boomers are divided into two groups: early, those born between 1946 and 1955, and late, those born from 1956 to 1964. Some researchers expand the definition a few years on either end to include “psychological cohorts” who identify with boomers’ tendencies to question authority, strive for perfection, delay marriage and parenthood and file for divorce.

Demographers note that boomers are hitting midlife at vastly varying points in the life cycle: Some have small children, some have children in college, at least half are divorced, about a quarter are single, and more than that are childless. In a traditional life cycle, midlife transition does not begin until the children leave home, according to Gutmann.

In his studies of 26 societies around the world, including Americans from Kansas, traditional Navajo Indians and the Druze of Israel and the Golan Heights, he found a universal pattern, based more on life stages than chronological age. As soon as children leave home, he says, women ascend to powerful managerial positions in the home, while men become more passive. In some religious societies, the loss of physical beauty is replaced by honor in the community.

Unfortunately, in America, Gutmann says, esteem for elders of either gender is rare. No matter whether society values them or not, no middle-aged people in any culture, he says, like the “narcissistic wounds” of aging: tired eyes, sagging jaws, swollen thighs, vanishing hair and sex drive--wounds already inflicted on the boomer vanguard.

This is just a taste of what’s to come: heart and breathing problems, hearing loss (exacerbated by--ahem!--the use of certain drugs or exposure to loud sounds), inability to read anything closer than three feet. And, of course, the progressive deterioration of mental faculties.

When the image begins to go, Gutmann says, “they get worried. There’s a frantic emphasis on dieting and exercise. Ultimately, it’s a doomed effort. You can’t hold off the aging process forever. There’s good evidence that we’re programmed to get old and die.”

The morning sun/When it hits your face/ Really shows your age “Maggie May,” Rod Stewart (1971) Ten years ago, a New York nurse we’ll call “Cher” gave up smoking and started to exercise. She was 35 and had never been married. Over years of daily workouts before the mirror, she watched her body becoming more youthful while her face became wrinkled and saggy.

At 42, it became too painful. “I always considered myself attractive. It was hard for me to watch my face get old-looking,” she says. A student of Jungian philosophy who had attended her share of poetry readings and consciousness raisings, she entered a serious debate with herself about plastic surgery.

She thought to herself: It’s so superficial. So frivolous. But then again, she reasoned, she had lived the first part of her life mentally. She had been involved in social issues. And now she had the money, why not? Why not live the second part of her life with an emphasis on the physical?

She talked it over with a friend for two years. Plastic surgery won. “The first thing I had done was an eye job. They take the fat out from under your eyes. I was pleased with that. After that I had a face-lift. Then I had a breast-lift. It can become addictive. Once you fix something, you start seeing other things you want fixed.”

Suddenly men found her attractive. She began to date. She took up dancing and never felt rejected. “I became like a teen-ager.” Then she had a breast-cancer scare. The difficulty she had in sharing her fear with her boyfriend made her wonder if her life had become too physical. “It made me feel a little sad. Like I was maybe not being loved and wanted for who I really am.”

Cher wishes the world she inhabits were more Zen-like, “where we revere age, and people look forward to getting older and wisdom and stuff like that. It would be wonderful. But, it’s like, we’re part of this culture. The values, or the lack of values, are so ingrained.”

As boomers age, and push comes to shove, something, she believes, must be done. “Either we have to change our attitudes and our values, or we have to keep inventing new plastic-surgery procedures.”

Women still obtain the majority of face-lifts, but surgeons say that males now account for a third of their business, largely because boomer men feel they need youthful looks to compete at work. One Rancho Mirage plastic surgeon offers busy executives portable telephones, fax machines and secretarial services so that they can keep up with their work while they recover from surgery. Sometimes, says Dr. David Morrow, he does “multiple executives of a company. They can come down, they get done, and even during (the) post-operative (stage), they can have meetings.”

Not everyone dislikes midlife. Some boomers such as family physician and triathlete Rich Johnson of Pacific Palisades don’t even believe in a midlife crisis. Johnson, 39, looks forward to 40 because it will put him in the youngest slot of the 40-to-45 age group, giving him a competitive edge. He runs about 30 to 40 miles a week, bikes 60 to 80 miles a week and swims three nights a week in a masters’ swim program.

His regimen has nothing to do with appearance, he says. “You just feel better.” Sometimes his wife and children bike with him. Sometimes they come and watch. “I think (it makes for) a good role model . . . to see activities that adults enjoy. I think that’s important,” he says. However, fitness specialists say boomers tend to hone their own bodies at the expense of their kids’. “While the boomers are swimming an extra lap, or running an extra mile, the kids are likely sitting and watching TV, waiting for the parents to pick up pizza,” says Lewis G. Maharam, medical director of the Sports Medicine Associates in New York.

Eyeing the upcoming surge of wounded, middle-aged people, entrepreneurs who cater to the so-called grumpies--grown up, mature (and, may we say, often unbearably pretentious?) professionals--are very excited. They are ready with such products and services as rimless bifocals, full-legged jeans with lots of pleats, hot-flash hot lines, and mugs, party buttons and T-shirts that say “Recycled Teen-ager.”

Randy Harris and Allan Shook, owners of Over the Hill Products in Yorba Linda, say the market is so ripe that their 30th-, 40th- and 50th-birthday-party goods evolved from a fad into a thriving business with 12,000 accounts. Their warehouse is packed floor to ceiling with T-shirts, mugs and hats--mostly for men. “Forty Happens” is their best seller. Women who turn 40 are not teasable, they say. Nor do their slogans ever tease men about baldness. Baldness, say the owners, both of whom turned 40 this year, is not really funny.

Ever since I was a kid at school/I messed around with all the rules/Apologized then realized/I’m not different after all “I Was Only Joking,” Rod Stewart (1978) Mommy,” my daughter asks, “were you a hippie?”

We are driving down the Santa Ana Freeway after Christmas dinner with relatives. The question from a 9-year-old is directed to her parent with custody--a graying 43-year-old who has twice been mistaken for her grandmother (that was in my politically correct phase, when I refused to dye my hair).

A hippie? As it turns out, what she wants to know is not what I did in the ‘60s, but what I wore.

“I wore bell-bottom pants,” I say carefully. Then think I should add, “But I didn’t take drugs.” Which is the story I will stick to throughout her adolescence.

Actually, and I want to get this right for posterity, the majority of first-wave boomers are not veterans of the Vietnam War, and despite the Pill, the women’s movement and the protests, all of which catapulted us into uncharted social terrain, the ‘60s were not personally “tumultuous” for many individuals coming of age. They were fun.

A whiff of patchouli or hearing the once-naughty “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in an elevator can transport me back to those days of graduate classes in art history for which my parents graciously paid and which I never finished, those Indian print bedspreads, the wind through my hair driving up to Big Sur on my way to witness the People’s Park riots in Berkeley, chuckling heartily at the Watergate hearings on TV.

It was the ‘80s that were tumultuous: childbirth, divorce, adventures in dating. Spending too much money on silk things and health clubs and therapists whose personal problems dwarfed my own.

To tell the truth--and at this point, why not?--I’ve just been too busy to notice my life was half over until it occurred to me that I will probably die without achieving two fairly important things I always took for granted: one, an enduring relationship with a great guy, and two, a house with more than 1,000 square feet. Worse, I am not even unique.

“This is a generation,” says RAND’s Morrison, “that has bumped into two social changes as it has matured: what happened in the housing market and what happened to marriage as an institution.”

In 1980, 71% of all 35- to 39-year-olds in the United States were homeowners. In 1989, only 64% owned homes, he says. The figures are likely more dramatic in California, where prices are higher. Many boomers were able to capitalize on the lucrative housing market by borrowing from their parents, Morrison says. Those who postponed buying and missed out “didn’t realize the window would close in the late ‘80s.” Consequently, he says, there are two types of boomers--haves and have-nots--who will probably remain so for the rest of their lives. About the only thing that can help them financially is a working spouse.

The prevailing explanation for boomers’ soaring divorce rates is that so many women entered the work force, they could suddenly afford to leave an unhappy marriage. Then it became acceptable. Now, in a declining economy, marriage is a “built-in shock absorber,” Morrison says. If one spouse loses a job, there is another income, as well as access to a wide range of benefits.

As younger boomers understand the need for such “social insurance,” the divorce rate is leveling out. According to Cheryl Russell, author of “100 Predictions for the Baby Boom,” older baby boomers dissolved 59% of their first marriages, younger boomers, only 52%.

“We started off with the notion that creative divorce was the thing--and serial monogomy,” says Judith Wallerstein, executive director for the Center for the Family in Transition in Corte Madera. “The implication was that it was terribly old-fashioned to think of spending a whole lifetime with the same person.”

Boomers, she says, thought that “you could have children according to a biological clock, but if you didn’t, (the clock) could be extended by technology. That didn’t take into consideration the psychological demands of a child or the demands on a career that don’t stop when the child stops nursing.

“We’ve been sobered. We haven’t come back to where we were, but we’re left with a sense of having pursued the wrong ideas and that we didn’t really see the consequences.”

What people in their 40s face now, Wallerstein says, “is a sense of having more questions than answers. There’s very little that’s reassuring about relationships between men and women. The anxieties and the angers are more acknowledged than the love.”

I don’t have a friend who feels at ease/I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees “American Tune,” Paul Simon (1973)

Middle-age crazies” used to refer to men who woke up one morning, rolled over, looked at their wives and became terrified of having to spend the next 20 or 30 years with the same woman. They proceeded to buy gold chains and convertibles and date cheerleaders.

Now, both men and women wake up, roll over, look at the alarm clock, think about going to work and are terrified about having to spend the next 30 or 40 years at the same job.

“What terrifies us with all these years to go is, do we want to do the same old grind just to pay the mortgage?” asks USC Professor of Sociology Barry Glassner, 39, whose book on midlife “career crashing” is due out next year. “We were brought up to think that life was going to be ever more exciting. We came of age in a time that really was exciting.” But now, no matter how lucrative or glamorous their lifework once seemed, the thrill is gone. Their careers seem dull or downright discouraging.

Successful women who wanted to succeed in careers because their mothers never fulfilled their potential are finding that the dream they achieved was not their own, but their mother’s. First they get depressed, then they often start blaming their mothers, then they get on a different career track and explore what they really want.

Among the 120 baby boomers he studied, Glassner found a teacher who quit and went to law school, an attorney who became a citrus farmer, and a Hollywood director who entered medical school. The reasons can be voluntary, such as boomers who feel compelled to veer off the straight-and-narrow path to explore something more fulfilling. Or, it can be involuntary. Facing so much corporate “downsizing,” many of the more ambitious boomers are rudely surprised to find themselves bumping against the glass ceiling or, worse yet, out of work.

Some find new ways of being satisfied in their old jobs. Others don’t do anything and develop a secret life on the side. Says Glassner: “Their clients don’t know they are waiting for the hour to pass so they can get into their real life, what they are really living for, which is to play drums in the band.”

At 35, Tom Kuhn was a divorced dentist. The beautiful home in Marin County had been divvied up. He was sitting in a Haight-Ashbury cafe. He looked out the window and saw some kids skateboarding by. “I thought, man, that looks so great. Life is passing me by, and I never even attempted to get on a skateboard.”

Boomer “cohort” Kuhn, now 48, is a practitioner of yoga and tai chi. In his youth, he developed an affinity for the counterculture of Allen Ginsburg and the beat poets. After that scene in the cafe, he realized it was time to act. First he bought a skateboard--and a lot of padding--and rode it to work every day for years. Then he invented a line of aluminum-and-ball-bearing yo-yos that he now markets across the country. He remarried and cut back his dental practice to two days a week.

His career turn resulted from “a realization that every minute is important. I have to go for it, in a sense utilizing my time in an authentic way. A shift happens when you reach your 40s, an accelerated sense of time passing.”

While some might argue that the generation’s main problem is precisely that it never grew up, Kuhn contends that “there’s a child living within all of us that tends to get neglected in our complex society. It’s important, our duty and our right to nurture that child, to constantly rediscover that part of us that is childlike, that loves to play. The thing I’m getting a sneak preview of is that as we give up certain things, it makes room for new things, new realms.”

She’s scared. Scared she’ll run out of time “Nick of Time,” Bonnie Raitt (1989) All the 15 women, and the few men, in Dr. Larry Werlin’s Newport Beach waiting room look to be over 35. Like other infertility specialists, Werlin has seen an influx of boomer women who have delayed motherhood and now, approaching menopause, are unable to conceive. Some patients wait as long as six months for an appointment.

While infertility rates have remained constant, the number of women seeking infertility services grew by 250,000--to 1.3 million--from 1977 to 1987, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. One reason infertility seems like such a defining issue of the era is that while women once kept quiet about it, they now talk openly to People magazine. (“ ‘I Want a Child’--Connie Chung.”)

“Very few things are elemental in this world,” says sociologist Schwartz. “The marriage or the job may not be forever. The quest for success and identity comes to a halt. You may get what you want, then what? All that is sobering. You think, what’s life about, anyhow? In its best sense, the idea of a child is the most exciting, the most enduring, the most primal kind of connection there is. People are aching for this kind of connection.”

One of Werlin’s patients, a 45-year-old flight attendant, is scheduled for her second in-vitro procedure (each of which costs about $12,000)--and if it doesn’t work, she will try a third. It wasn’t until she was 43 and had been married for about a year that she began to wake up in the pre-dawn hours with the uncomfortable feeling that something was missing. “I began to realize, I think it’s children. I felt as though the rest of my life would not be complete unless I did everything I could possibly do to try and have children at this late date. It may be too late; I don’t know.”

If she succeeds, the fact that she will be 60 when her child is 14 doesn’t faze her. Her child will be lucky, she believes, and certainly better off with elderly parents, than those whose parents discard them in bathrooms and dumpsters. Her husband, 46, tapes the in-vitro procedures in order to show the child “this is how it all happened.” (Having some experience in these matters, I can almost hear the mortified teen-ager: “Oh, Mom, don’t show the conception tape again!”)

Curiously, older parents who finally get the children they so desperately want run the risk of producing what Boston pediatrician Barry Brazelton calls “the Jesus child”--a miracle baby who is worshipped, overprotected and not allowed to develop normally. “Baby boomers started the whole concept of perfect parenting and the perfect child,” he says. Jesus children, he says, are liable to be “tense.”

Rock and roll is here to stay/It’s better to burn out/Than to fade away “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Blue),” Neil Young (1979) A few words about rock ‘n’ roll. The world’s first exclusively youth-oriented music, it united us, separating us from our parents. Rock ‘n’ roll and baby boomers grew up together. But now that we’re getting old, and it’s not, it’s uniting us, uncomfortably in some cases, with the next generation. (“Why don’t they get their own music?” one grumpie whines.)

In any case, rock was “the diary of our lives, and still is to some extent,” says rock ‘n’ roll archivist Michael Ochs. “You hear ‘Unchained Melody,’ and you say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was going with Jan then.’ ” Ochs lives in a Venice manufacturing zone where he can turn up the volume and where he has built a cement-block fortress to house his collection of rock ‘n’ roll photos, books and records. Leased out to clients, the photos and records now provide him and four employees with a living. Rock is not only his diary and his livelihood, it is his poetry, philosophy, medicine, consciousness-altering substance and significant other. “I bought into the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle,” he says. “But rock ‘n’ roll gave us paradigms that were hard to live up to.”

No one, he suggests, can continue to live the youthful, escapist life of clothes, cars, drugs and impersonal sex promised in rock ‘n’ roll lyrics. Love is particularly elusive. As if in explanation, he plays Rod Stewart’s “I Was Only Joking”: “Illusions of that grand first prize, slowly wearing thin. . . .”

What better epitomizes the split nature of the aging boomer than aging rockers themselves? The long gray hair and pot belly on the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. The Stones, preening rebels one minute, talk-show guests discussing sobriety the next. Loyal fans insist the situation is nothing like the ‘60s, when GIs tried to twist, adopted Nehru jackets and donned love beads. “If you can do it, why not?” asks Dennis McNally, publicist for the Grateful Dead. “Tina Turner has the best legs in America, and she’s over 50. ‘Who says rock ‘n’ roll is only for the young? Why? Says who?”

Ochs, whose brother is the late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, watched friends turn into family men while his relationships fell by the wayside. Now Ochs is 48. He says the women are harder to find, especially in L.A. They’ve been serially wounded. They project their old disappointments onto him.

Ochs puts on a slightly scratchy song on the turntable and turns up the volume. He taps his sockless feet on the table, and his dog crawls under his knees, wagging his tail to the beat. He lip-syncs the words he knows by heart: “Dark piano, be mine tonight, I’m in your spell.” A slow grin lights up his whole face, including the unfocused eyes behind prescription glasses. “The piano could be music or a woman,” he explains, nodding his head to the beat. “Music or a woman.”

Oh well, a touch of grey/Kind of suits you anyway “Touch of Grey,” Grateful Dead (1987)

Indulgent parents and Dr. Spock are commonly blamed for boomers’ arrogance and narcissism. But Bill Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of “Generations,” say it is the natural cycle of things and fits a predictable pattern.

They argue that boomers are merely “idealists,” one of four generational types that repeat every 100 years in the same order: Civic (the World War II GI generation that produced the last seven U.S. presidents); Adaptive (a silent group--the “nicest 50-year-olds we’ve seen in a long time”); Idealist (children born following a great crisis who come of age in a time of great spiritual awakening and regard their elders as moral mushrooms), and Reactive (the nation’s 13th generation, who are now, believe it or not, becoming “adults”).

“As a rule,” says Howe, a demographer and former editor of American Spectator magazine, “generations who are narcissistic at age 30 become aggressive moralizers at age 50. We see it again and again. When you have so much freedom early on, you don’t recommend it to others later on.” The last time an Idealist generation like the baby boomers hit middle age, he notes, we got Prohibition.

But some predict boomers will rise again politically, despite their continually dropping voter rates. “There was youthful activism and idealism, and some may find it and use it again,” psychologist Gutmann says. “I wish them luck.”

Presidential candidates, boomers or not, are already zeroing in on the boomers, using buzzwords like “this generation” and “future generation.” In fact, you hear an idea knocked around so often lately that it seems as if perhaps its time has come. That is: Somebody has to run this country, and it might as well be us, or else it will be some nerdy opportunist we went to school with.

Jan Pasternak, 44, of Silicon Valley is one of 11,000 members of the 2-year-old American Assn. of Boomers, based in Irving, Tex., which is gearing up to agitate for Social Security reform as well as child-care and elder-care benefits. Until now, she says, boomers never had the money, the time or the numbers to achieve political power. “The numbers that worked against us back then in housing, jobs and college, now work for us in political power. Sixty percent (of the people in) any room you walk into are boomers.”

A corporate secretary with a husband and two children, 19 and 22, Pasternak sounds like a candidate when she says, “We’d like our children to do better than we did, and the economy won’t provide it. We see our children having less than we do. It’s unacceptable.”

One former activist says she’s lost too many fights to remain a wide-eyed idealist. Susan Estrich, 38, used to make her own dresses out of Indian bedspreads. Then she managed political campaigns for Democratic candidates such as Michael Dukakis. Now married with a baby, she teaches law at USC, but she still champions the ‘60s values that shaped her life.

“The ‘60s weren’t about the silly clothes we wore. They were not about drugs or sleeping outside or having sex. What is essential is the powerful sense that politics made a difference, of people having responsibility to one another, having a sense of community.

“I continue to believe that people have the ability to make a difference in their lives, that there is honor in trying to lead a life that’s true to some set of values you hold--(there is honor in) how you live in your community and how you live on a daily basis, extending a hand to help people or speaking what you believe when the occasion presents itself.”

Unlike traditional societies, where age roles are prescribed, Americans, for better or worse, get to invent themselves. For boomers, the possibilities are even greater. As Estrich observes, “There are so many of us, we get to define a culture.”

People try to put us d-down/J-just because we g-get around “My Generation,” The Who (1965)

But enough about us. What does the younger generation make of us?

Ian Williams, 23, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he was a columnist for the Daily Tarheel, says he has been “battling my hatred for all things boomeresque” for years. Retin-A, sound bites, instant analysis and target markets top his list. He also hates boomers’ complaints about his generation’s gerbil-like attention span and ignorance of geography. “It’s really tiring,” he says. But what really gets him are this year’s spate of movies such as “City Slickers,” “The Doctor” and “Regarding Henry,” depicting boomer men in midlife crises being transformed into reasonable humans.

“It’s really insulting to those of us who are faced with a much bleaker noncartoon world. We don’t have any idealism the way you had. At least we’re honest. One thing our generation definitely is, is self-admitted crud. We know what our shortcomings are.”

The boomer backlash is solidifying with books such as “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” by an envious and resentful 29-year-old Canadian named Douglas Coupland.

Frequently pushed out of the professional job market by boomers, the members of this so-called Generation X often hold McJobs (“low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry”). The book has chapters titled “Our Parents Had More” and “I Am Not a Target Market.” It has definitions such as “Rebellion Postponement: the tendency in one’s youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience. Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age 30, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes.”

Thank you for sharing, guys.

Well, it’s all right/Even if the sun don’t shine/Well, it’s all right/We’re going to the end of the line “End of the Line,” Traveling Wilburys (1988)

When my best friend, Vicki, my role model for political correctness, turned 40, she went to a weight-loss clinic and shed 20 pounds, rinsed her hair with henna and changed jobs three times. This year, one too many men asked her, incredulously, “You’re really 46? Hahaha. Hahaha.” She announced that from now on she will be lying about her age.

I’m sorry to say that I responded with a serious lecture on inner personhood and changing the world’s perceptions of what 46 is. I hope I never do that again.

Who said we had to age gracefully, anyway? So what if we don’t have a savings account? Or 3.2 children? We have great stereo systems. Some of us still have our hair. If we really concentrate, we may still be able to recall the former California state motto: “Hey, if it works for you. . . .”

And if all else fails, at least we have each other.