Joseph Epstein dissects the American fixation on youth

At a certain point in American life, the young ceased to be viewed as a transient class and youth as a phase of life through which everyone soon passed. Instead, youthfulness was vaunted and carried a special moral status. Adolescence triumphed, becoming a permanent condition. As one grew older, one was presented with two choices, to seem an old fogey for attempting to live according to one’s own standard of adulthood, or to go with the flow and adapt some variant of pulling one’s long gray hair back into a ponytail, struggling into the spandex shorts, working on those abs, and ending one’s days among the Rip Van With-Its. Not, I think, a handsome set of alternatives.