EIGHT years ago I had just turned 13. I was in the seventh grade, and I skipped band every day to sit around in free period reading science fiction. I remember reading a lot of Harlan Ellison. It was the age when "I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream" can seem a profound statement of the human condition.

The hostages in Iran had just come home, so the little eagles in cages on the nightly news finally disappeared. And Reagan had just taken office. He has been the president of my adolescence all the way to my first tenuous steps into adulthood. As the child of liberal parents, I had soberly assessed the possiblities of a religious-right wing autocracy and found it likely, not to mention the likelihood of my life ending in a ditch in Central America.

But the transformation in the lives of my contemporaries was far more subtle. Reagan's desire (apart from that of some his crazier compatriots) was foremost to rid the country of its malaise, and to dispel what he felt was a national gloom. He mentioned this proudly only last week in his farewell address. In some sense, he has surely succeeded in restoring hope and confidence, for the economic recovery of the last several years would never have succeeded without the faith of investors.

YET at most the new confidence seems only to be centered in the self, and only secondarily in the system. We have become introspective; a nation of ones under God. This is nowhere more apparent than in the youth that has come of age in this decade--even the community minded among them are often preoccupied with personal appearance and success.

First, there is the cult of the body, whose origins extend to the physical fitness craze of the last decade, but since then it has hypertrophied into a multibillion-dollar industry of fad diets and workouts, swank running shoes and high-tech exercise equipment. Who has not known someone whose motto is "no pain, no gain" or someone who scrutinizes their muscles for their tone?

This new preoccupation with the physical self has banished cigarettes, once a staple of American culture, to furtive corners. Personally, this is fine by me, but it is startling how the Surgeon General's admonitions have become effective only with the coming of the new purity. It is also curious how the 80's have been a time of rising drinking ages and new heights in anti-drug hysteria (only cocaine, with its connotations of physical "acceleration" and personal wealth, has any style left at all).

The most popular ideologies of youth--punk negativism, resurgent capitalism, and new age intuitionism--all are inward-looking philosophies, aspects of a narcissistic time. Reagan's impermeable sheen, his success through avoiding responsiblity for anything, has become something to strive for.

IF the icon of the old capitalism was the backyard inventor (as nostalgically recalled in the movie "Tucker"), the undoubted emblem of the new capitalism is the silk-draped Wall Street arbitrageur. The latter schemes to make money from money, rather than making money from a product that would potentially benefit all.

Even the rebellions against this way of life are private ones. The phenomenal growth in mysticism and flamboyant "consciousness-raising" combines a desire for personal transformation and spiritual health, and a will to screen out the world with environmental music. It is the mirror image of the punk movement, which hopes not to change society, but to create a zone of destruction around the listener in assertion of his autonomy.

In particular, all youth is mad about appearance. For some, it is the designer labels, for others, a flashy neoprimitivism, and of course, the punk hair and fashion styles (somewhat muted) have diffused to become fixtures of a generation whose members feel compelled to make "statements" with green hair, polo players, crystals, and motorcycle boots, even unto the "artful" ripping of jeans--a message that bespeaks both bodily obsession and an obscene consumerism.

Perhaps the source of this introspection is a retreat from the grave but somewhat intangible problems that are our main threat these days. Our enemies have no faces any more. Budget and trade deficits, atmospheric pollution, or AIDS, are all soluble, but they are complex and they grow upon us almost invisibly. Even our main human antagonists can no longer be named or placed. They are terrorists, whose actions strike us without warning.

Perhaps it is a sign of our sophistication that we are having a hard time delineating the bad from the good. But it is a sign of our weakness that we escape from complexity into ourselves.

It has been a curious time to grow up in America, and the answer of authority, as espoused by William J. Bennett (who will now redirect his no-saying from financial aid to drugs), was a call for a greater "moral discipline" or a return to the past. Of course what we really need is more attention to the moral questions--not just the old answers--along with the rigorously trained minds and modern educations capable and desirous of reflecting on them. But usually, we've been thinking about something else.