Kids These Days
by Michael Penn

I recently attended a conference of magazine editors in a downtown Chicago hotel. These affairs aren't exactly full of epiphanic revelations; usually, the serious debates are over things like run-ons and the serial comma. But there, in a seriously overheated ballroom, surrounded by complimentary canapés and Diet Coke, I realized something that will change the course of my life.

I'm old.

This dawned on me as I took a seat in the conference session entitled, "Attracting Young Readers: How to Appeal to Generation Y." This is a hot topic among magazine editors, because, like every other journalistic work that you can't download, our readers are starting to resemble the cast of Cocoon. They're old and — most frightening to us — hurtling toward death. At the publication that employs me, we break out the party hats if we get a letter from a reader in their fifties. We're tempted to send out cholesterol tests.

So the magazine industry — like car manufacturers, video-game creators and Jack Nicholson — is desperate to woo young people. But it's kind of a scary, stumbling, geek-in-the-headlights love. Editors want young people to read their work, but damn if they can figure out how to talk to them. In the eyes of most editors, kids are a foreign culture, full of strange voodoo and folklore. They should be approached carefully, with plenty of gifts.

The industry doesn't even talk about young people as people. They're a demographic — a single organism, to be studied and evaluated. We are always subjecting young people to marketing's answer to the alien rectal probe, the focus group. And the results are often disastrous. Whenever elders believe they know what kids want, they spawn horrible new creations, like Code Red Mountain Dew, the Toyota Scion and the first Clinton cabinet.

Just look at the Chicago Tribune's RedEye, which is button-down journalism's supposed answer to what the young readers want. It's about as patently pathetic in its attempts to infuse the news with hipness (possible headline: "Chechen Rebels Say 'Boo-Yah' to Peace Accords") as your dad's insistence that Bachman Turner Overdrive transcends time.

So there I was listening to a speaker prattle on about the mysterious, inscrutable young when I realized that, at some point in the past, I was the guy he was talking about. I used to listen to music that petrified my parents. I said bad when things were good, and stupid when things were smart. I was as inscrutable to others as they are now to me.

I've come to realize that you don't forfeit your hipness knowingly. It just sort of drifts away from you. The things you subverted get subverted again, until you don't recognize them. It's like Abraham Simpson once lamented: "I used to be with it. But then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me."

The strange thing is how fast it all happened. It's not like I'm Methuselah. I'm not even 34. And yet I'm one year away from getting kicked out of the hallowed 18-to-34 marketing demographic, which is the Eskimo ice floe of postmodern America. Once you're no longer 18-to-34, you're no longer part of the world of commodities and services officially designated as "young." At 35, they start looking at you funny when you walk into a Gap, and you start wondering when jeans got such skinny asses.

I'm on the brink of a world defined by lawn care, sensible transportation and family-size juice containers. But my pledge to you, the torch-bearers of hip, is that I'll go willingly. I won't pander to you by hanging at your bars or trying to talk about nu-metal and Xbox. I won't pretend to know what makes you tick, what you're thinking, or why you don't vote. I'll just stand aside, content in my oldness, and wait until it happens to you.

E-mail Michael Penn at mpenn@facstaff.wisc.edu.

— graphic by Mike Fisher (crspeedy@crspeedy.com)