Have we forgotten how to have a good time?

In the winter of 2001, a man came to us and told us to party hard. He was shaggy-haired and pillowy-lipped and, on the cover of his debut album, the lower half of his face was slick with blood and sweat. He was not asking us to party, he was warning that our very survival depended on doing so.

It was only months after 9/11, and New York City was still papered with the names of beloved friends and family members who went to work that morning and never returned. The George W. Bush administration was spoiling for war, anti-Muslim rhetoric was on the ascent and weapons of mass destruction were being willed into existence. Andrew W.K. emerged out of nowhere (technically, Michigan) in stark-white jeans, a matching T-shirt, and with sonic directives — “Time to Party,” “Party Hard,” “Party ‘Til You Puke” — delivered not with carefree whoops and hoots but with zealous, fire-and-brimstone fervor.

In the regressive, paranoid early years of a new millennium, W.K. was the furious groove commander we needed. Twenty-five years on, what kind of party person does our era, — still regressive and paranoid, but now also disinformation-addled and atomized by technology — require? Well, for starters, one with both a manifesto and a wellness-informed, can-do attitude.

“We don’t know how to connect anymore,” asserts Evan Cudworth, aka The Party Coach. “We’re overstimulated but undernourished. We scroll more than we show up. We numb, avoid, compare, perform, ghost. And we call it fun.” His holistic mission is to “save our social life.” And, for many people, his methods are meeting the moment.

Life coaching is a relatively young industry, emerging in the 1980s out of the Human Potential Movement and informed by positive psychology. Now a multibillion-dollar industry that’s projected to keep growing, life coaching has branched into specialties: There’s executive coaching, financial coaching, Christian life coaching, wellness coaching, romance coaching, divorce coaching and more. However farcical it might sound, party coaching has some resonance for Americans right now: We’re stuck in the grindset and strapped for leisure time. We’re hyperaware and numbing out. Our collective nervous systems are in shambles. Many of us are arrested in the fight-or-flight mode of attenuated post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts people living through, say, a global pandemic or an extended hostage situation.

On social media, the line between “party” and “branded influence activation” can be blurry. In person, the line between regular partying and compulsive escapism has been snorted, probably. As a result, far fewer of us are deliberately spending time with people we don’t know. As The Atlantic put it in January 2025, we are running a party deficit.

Cudworth, a man who genuinely seems to have been born to party, wants to help us all raise the vibes. He wants us to be party-literate and able to discern the actual party from the well-curated performance of a good time. His goal is to spring us all from what he calls the “panopticon of fun,” in which having a blast is often predicated on other people witnessing you having a blast.

Parties, says Cudworth, are the arena where the rubber hits the road. They require our full toolbox: the things we discuss with therapists, the affirmations we speak into mirrors, the habits we track, TikTok–sourced mental-health hacks. He theorizes that party culture reflects the mood of a populace: “I think we’ve been in this great Apollonian return of wellness culture, of the sculpture of the world, of the need to be seen. But I think people are now craving the Dionysian: the lose-yourself, dissolve-your-ego, melt-into-a-crowd desire, a belief in letting the seriousness of yourself go for a bit. That, I think, can be really scary for people.”

The 30-something Cudworth describes himself as a “precocious overthinker who found a lot of solace and realness in the party scene,” and who has made it a habit to keep an eye out for ways to inject partying into everyday routine. In his professional life (he spent 8 years in college-admissions consulting before pivoting to coaching), “I was the person who always wanted to create culture, whatever that was. Doing college-admissions work, I organized happy hours for the admissions officers on the road. Connecting and being at [work] in a way where it was more than just a job was always really important to me.”

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The idea of party coaching hit him at a time when most people weren’t partying much at all. He was living in famously party-friendly Venice Beach at the time, where social-distance protocol allowed for moon circles on the beach, but none of the raves or festivals Cudworth had been immersed in for more than a decade. The live DJ parties thrown on Zoom or Twitch during the pandemic, he says, couldn’t duplicate the alchemy of a live crowd united in collective ass-shaking. The usual modes of communal hedonism definitely weren’t the same. At these events, he recalls, “There were Zoom rooms where people would go off and each do drugs in their separate home but together — so you could feel like you were, you know, out doing drugs together.”

It was this bleak facsimile that, one day, stopped him short. “I remember being in my apartment, closing my laptop, drunk and racked on cocaine and thinking, whatever this is, it is not partying. This thought shot through my heart, like, you need to do something about it. The recognition that “people were desperate for connection,” he says, sparked an idea — but he had to address his own habits first. Cudwoth embarked on two years of going wherever he could to party and doing so stone-cold sober. “I needed to know, what is a rave without consumption? What is Burning Man without consumption? How does it feel to show up and be there if you’re not consuming the same way that everyone else is?”

Cudworth isn’t a fan of the all-or-nothing language of recovery programs, and doesn’t describe himself as sober. “I’ve spent a lot of time in sobriety communities,” he says, “and I don’t love the rhetoric that people who are out there drinking and using drugs are poisoning themselves and trying to escape life and making their own problems worse. I think it creates an identity for the sober community that everyone else is faking it, and we, the sober ones, are the real people. And it creates this isolation from what it means to be human.” He is, again, very pro-Dionysus. “It’s important for us as humans to go be messy with other humans, and not be the super cleaned-up versions of ourselves that we feel like we need to show off.”

The Party Coach’s practice, however, is a methodical, 7-step “social fitness” program called “The Party Within” grounded in mindfulness, habit building, and self-interrogation. “It’s a slow shift from a consumption-based mindset into a creation-based mindset for your social life,” he says. “It essentially breaks down 7 rituals, for lack of a better word, that we’re creating together.”

The 7 steps start with disconnection: “The first thing I have everyone do is, and this is a misnomer, a dopamine detox: a quiet period, optimally two or three days, away from social media. Just quieting down the stimulation of the world, hearing what’s coming up from within people, what things inside themselves they’re numbing or hiding away from.”

For Alicia, 36, this first step was crucial. A former college classmate of Cudworth’s, she took him up on a challenge to do Dry January with him in 2022. Already aware that she wanted to drink less for health reasons, she was inspired by the big swing Cudworth was taking by committing to a fully boozeless 2022. “I honestly thought that was crazy,” she laughs. “So I was like, Let me just start with one month.” A product manager in tech, Alicia had worked in social media for years and knew, in the abstract, how dopamine worked. But doing Cudworth’s 7-step program (at the time called Vibe Curator) made her aware of the risk that doomscrolling could be used, like alcohol once was, to fill a void.

The second step of the program, Cudworth says, “is where we let go of old identities that aren’t working for you anymore,” shaking loose past regrets and self-doubts. “Maybe you were the life of the party, and you don’t want to be that anymore. What are the identities that we’re letting go of?” As a Millennial, Cudworth considers nostalgia the most abused drug of his generation, “People chase the nostalgia of re-creating a night, or re-creating a specific memory or a specific time. I think that keeps you trapped in a version of the past.” He doesn’t listen to the music of his childhood or adolescence, focusing instead on discovery: “My life is always expanding when I’m interested in new things.”

The third step of The Party Within is what Cudworth calls a “wellness bender”: three weeks of establishing rituals and routines that serve to energize rather than deplete, with 7 daily activities (“7 is a big thing for Evan,” notes Alicia) that includes a cold shower or plunge, 3 minutes of journaling, eating whole foods, talking to a friend or stranger, and dancing. Cudworth credits wellness with changing his life — he’s also a hot-yoga instructor — but allows that it  can also be a slippery slope: “We end up with Oura rings and spreadsheets and ways that we’re optimizing our lives, but missing that sacred unsaid thing that happens when you’re just doing things for the sake of doing them.”

Reese, 32, a video engineer in sports broadcasting, credits Cudworth with showing him the value of a journaling practice. “He started me with a gratitude journal. I had never done that before, and it started with, like, one word or one sentence: I love my cat, I love my mom, I love a cup of coffee in the morning. And then by the end of the month, I was writing little essays in those journals, and it was fascinating to go from, ugh, why am I doing this? To, oh, this is really helpful.”

Cudworth acknowledges that it “might sound really cringey,” but he believes the habit-building stage shows clients “that there is this natural energy that’s in them. The things [you] think you need [to be social], like confidence or a drink or the right clothes — those kind of disappear as you work from within.” At the end of the 7 steps, clients have a blueprint for how to party in a way that is more creativity-focused (“What intentions am I bringing to this party?”) than consumption-focused (“How does this party serve my life/brand/aspirations?”).

I ask Cudworth what he’s seen change about party culture over the years, and he barely pauses before answering. “Having a good time or doing things just for the sake of doing them has become such a luxury that it’s almost looked down upon.” For him, the party mindset is an additive one that doesn’t offer quick fixes or push toxic positivity, and in this, he echoes his party-hard predecessor: Speaking to Salon in 2016, Andrew W.K. posed questions like, “Can we maintain the celebratory spirit in what might seem like impossible conditions?” At a time when prioritizing joy itself often feels like an impossible condition, The Party Coach knows he doesn’t have all the answers. “My frame is: Let’s experiment. Let’s grow. Let’s try this thing.”