If you're anything like me, you spent the better part of your teens and 20s tirelessly working on being, basically, a more interesting version of yourself. You didn't eat meat because your girlfriend when you were 16 was punk rock and militant and frankly made some good points about the environment, and so you decided to become punk rock and militant, too. Then you got to New York and learned about A.P.C. and the way the dusty wood-floored shop on Mercer Street smelled, the one with the big flat mirrors in the dressing room. You vowed to dress yourself to match the version of yourself you saw in that mirror. There was always something new to discover, in Chelsea and in museums uptown, where eventually you'd end up at Bemelmans or some other perfect old hotel bar. You went up to 14th Street and copped Hell Rell mixtapes with your friends and spent the rest of the night piling green bottles of beer in the center of the table at Odessa or wherever. Now you have a wine app on your phone. And it's fine. Wine is great. So is Hell Rell.

You spent years building up something—taste, experience, judgment. You were trying to like what you saw in the mirror, as all ambitious people try to do. What I am saying is, perhaps you actually like that person now. Perhaps you could use the mirror less.

I look at my heroes, and how we've aged together. I spent so much time studying them, modeling myself after them. And now here we all are: washed. Jay-Z's latest record, 4:44, was basically a catalog of all the things—the vulnerable feelings, the unflattering secrets, the self-doubt—he wouldn't allow himself to talk about on his 12 prior solo records. He made late-period albums such as 2013's Magna Carta Holy Grail, trying to convince all of us that he was still a world-beating giant. That everything was fine. But everything was not fine. I don't pop molly, I rock Tom Ford. You do what now? I was relieved when I heard 4:44. It's not a masterpiece—I think those are mostly behind Jay. But frankly he seems happier. He's out here demonstrating, in work and in life, how to act when the world that you once held in the palm of your hand starts to spin on without you.

I'm grateful for that example, as I am for those of so many others I've looked up to, and still do. Vince Carter—Vinsanity!—wincing at his 12th minute on the basketball court, still playing, throwing it down once in a while. Stephen Malkmus, noodling prettily through the occasional new record and watching tons of NBA games. Ad-Rock—hang out with that guy if you can; he's everything you'd hope he'd be. He was in the Beastie Boys, and now he's got his phone set up so that the text is as big as you can make it.

Golf represents a half-dozen things I was raised to despise. But it has quieted my demons in some real and undeniable way.

And I think about Roger Federer, an ivory-cardigan-draped fetish object to washed men such as myself. He's back at world number two as I write this, so maybe he's not the most obvious candidate for being washed. But people forget how long he was in the wilderness. I went to the U.S. Open in 2011, and he was up two match points against Novak Djokovic. Federer served. Djokovic slapped back a reckless forehand that, improbably, landed for a winner. The crowd made this weird dying noise—Aghughhhh. I was right there; it was like it was being pulled out of all of us: Aghughhhh. Afterward, Federer had some trouble recognizing himself as the person in the match who had not won. “It's awkward having to explain this loss,” he said, “because I feel like I should be doing the other press conference.” He'd already done some losing by that point, and he'd go on to do a lot more. But it was in this moment that Federer became washed. He modeled it for the rest of us. He didn't quit. But he let go of the idea of himself as perfection incarnate. He let go of the idea of himself, in some ways, entirely: After a decade of representing some abstractly infallible version of whatever it was he was trying to be—a pursuit that seemed to make him miserable, especially when he was young—he was just a man with a bad back and some talent that he was still trying to make the best of. He stopped crying so much in post-match interviews. He raised one set of twins, and then another. These days he takes the spring off in order to rest for the summer.