Last Friday I went out and cycled through four bars before returning to the one I actually like 20 minutes away. I sat at the bar alone for half a drink before confirming with the bartender that there were darts upstairs, hoping someone else would hear and follow me. Nobody did. I went upstairs and played darts alone anyway. I got into a flow state while throwing, solving every problem I'd been pondering for the last week. One of my favorite OK Go songs came on and I performed a little solo boogie.
Once the bar closed at 11 I decided to walk a long lap around the area before heading home. I passed another bar that looked packed, walked in, and instantly said "so this is where everyone was while I was playing darts". I wandered over to the bar and sat next to a guy from Buffalo. He had a lot to say, and we sat talking until around 1:30.
The old version of me doesn't make it up those stairs. The old me finishes the rest of his drink, decides darts alone is embarrassing, and drives home by 9:45, filing it away as proof that going out doesn't work for him.
Because this is what I think being cooked actually is, and it has nothing to do with your age. Cooked is a headcount. It's how many people you believe are watching you. The cooked person is operating under the impression that a jury is present. They can't dance because the jury is watching, can't go to the thing alone because the jury will notice, can't try the new hobby badly in public because the jury takes attendance. And the jury does not exist. It disbanded years ago. Some people are still submitting evidence.
I know because I wrote a whole post about the fun police and buried the lede: I spent my entire twenties as one, and the person I policed hardest was me. Every impulse to dance, sing, wave, or join in got arrested on the spot, always on the same charge: you're too old for this, act your age. I was 24. Cooked, and I hadn't even preheated.
Which brings me to the 40-year-olds. Some of them are cooked, but not because they're 40. They're cooked because they never got told the jury disbanded after high school, so they've been performing restraint for an empty room for twenty years and calling it maturity. Meanwhile there's a 72-year-old at a wedding moving like the floor belongs to them, and the reason is not energy. It's that she stopped counting the audience a long time ago and never picked it back up. I know people who were cooked at 25 and people who won't be cooked a day in their life.
I owe the reroute to Catherine Price. Her book The Power of Fun put a name to what I'd been starving myself of. She defines true fun as the overlap of three things: playfulness, connection, and flow. I read that and realized I'd spent a decade engineering my life to avoid all three, then wondered why I felt dead inside. So I started practicing, in the least cool ways available to me. I dance alone in my house now, not because a song happens to come on, but because I decide to. That Friday at the bar was the practice paying off.
And here's my honest scoreboard from that night: the darts and the boogie got me playfulness and flow, two out of Price's three. Connection was the leg I was still missing, and then I sat down next to a person at the bar and talked for hours, which makes me think the first two legs go find the third on their own. In Socializing Potential Energy I wrote that every room is full of potential social energy waiting for someone to transition it. Fun is the transition. I didn't plan that conversation and I couldn't have scheduled it. I just stayed out past the point where the old me would have gone home, and the connection appeared right in front of me. A cooked person never gets there. They walk through rooms full of possible friends and leave every one of them exactly as quiet as they found it.
That's the real cost, and it's the one the fun police never write on the ticket. Being cooked isn't just boring, it's isolating. Play is one of the only things that lets strangers of any age skip the small talk and actually connect. When you decide you're too old to play, you're not protecting your dignity, you're opting out of the main way humans reach each other. A cooked person is a lonely person in training.
So no, I don't think some 40-year-olds are cooked because they turned 40. I think they got cooked because they quietly agreed to stop showing up for the vibe check, and 40 was just the year it got obvious. The good news, the part the fun police really don't want you to know, is that the vibe check runs every single day. You can retake it whenever you want. On a random Friday. Alone. On the top floor of a bar, throwing darts at nothing, dancing to a song only you can hear.
Age is a vibe, not a number. You don't age out of fun: you opt out. And the door back in is unlocked. Even alone. Even now. Come on in, the waters fine.