Adventures at Midlife

I like Meghan Daum, so much so that I ordered her essay collections and subscribed to her weekly column. Now a columnist with the LA Times, she is perhaps best known for a startling essay published in The New Yorker in 1999 where she outlined how completely impossible it is for a normal person to afford to live in New York City. She retreated to the financial obscurity of Nebraska for a time before ending up in LA.

Her latest column has been nagging at me ever since it showed up Monday. A fairly attractive woman, Daum describes a visit to a dermatologist to take care of an “inconsequential” scar on her knee:

Without looking at my chart, the porcelain-skinned, flawlessly made-up “laser spa technician” led me into the treatment room, gestured toward a hulking machine worthy of the Starship Enterprise, glanced up at me and asked, “Just your face today?”

At that moment, the era of not worrying about my face came to a screeching halt. My adolescence and early adulthood had been marked by a low-grade dissatisfaction with just about every other aspect of my appearance (there was so much to hate about my hair and body that a little blotchiness and acne seemed like lint on my shirt by comparison), but now I was officially at war with my face.

Granted, Daum nows lives in SoCal, where agonizing over the encroachments of age has become a religion, but for the technician to assume she was ready to grapple in mortal combat with her face made me squirm. She goes on to make the case that high-definition television, which has the ability to magnify every enlarged pore to the size of a quarter, isn’t going to go away. HD camcorders will bring our personal hard truths to our own televisions, and we’re all going to be judged by an increasingly high standard.

Another recent article in the NYTimes echoed her concern in a review of a new book, Charla Krupp’s How Not to Look Old:

The book is the latest makeover title to treat the aging of one’s exterior as a disease whose symptoms are to be fought to the death or, at least, mightily camouflaged. But the book offers a serious rationale for such vigilant attempts at age control, arguing that trying to pass for younger is not so much a matter of sexual allure as of job security…

Many people would shun a book if it were titled “How Not to Look Jewish” or “How Not to Look Gay” because to cater to discrimination is to capitulate to it. But the success of “How Not to Look Old” indicates that popular culture is willing to buy into ageism as an acceptable form of prejudice, even against oneself.

The story also quotes a study that “found that younger women were 40 percent more likely to receive an offer of a job interview than women over 50; a woman over 50 in Boston would have to send in 27 résumés just to get one job interview, where a younger woman would have to send in only 19.” Oh, and the article also mentions how put out Rush Limbaugh is at having to watch Hillary Clinton age over the course of the elections — EXCUSE ME? WHAT?

What do you do with this kind of information? I work in an office full of 20-somethings who are in the full bloom of youth and enthusiasm but who don’t yet have a tenth of my skills and experience — and apparently I’m the one who should be worried. My generation is being taught to despise itself, and we’re not putting up much of a fight.

And to all the 20-somethings out there shaking their heads at my age and foolishness, I always have the same sad thought:

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.