Mad Men returns: Has the high-rolling, thrill-seeking lifestyle portrayed in the TV hit really run out of puff?

• Betty Draper (January Jones), Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) and Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) vamp it up in Mad Men

As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink. Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the seven-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can't help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?

In the early 1960s, they smouldered against the repression of the 50s; and it may be that we smoulder a little against the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times.

Which is to say that these days, the careful anthropologist observes brief, furtive forays into the world of excess in highly functional and orderly people. I notice more than one mother sneaking out of a party for a secret cigarette in my garden; I hear another talk about how she has two or three glasses of wine every night, how she might be an alcoholic.

One hears the rumble of these guilty pleasures, these tiny rebellions, these momentary flares of intensity or escape, and yet, in the end our vices are so minor and controlled. The large-scale messiness of Mad Men is not for us, the freefall into chaos; it frightens and enthrals us. What we want, in other words, is to watch four seasons of it through the safe, skewed mirror of TV.

In a casual investigation into those lost and well-dressed years, I had lunch with Jerry Della Femina, whose 1970 memoir, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, is considered the inspiration for Mad Men. I notice when he talks about those days he uses the word "fun," which stands out to me as exotic and old-fashioned. Who has fun in the office today?

Maybe they are disappearing onto Facebook, but they are not expecting the cocktail party atmosphere of Sterling Cooper; they are not expecting fun.

It is true that these days, people of Don Draper's age and situation pour energy into beautiful vacations, or cook intricate meals for a dinner party from organic ingredients. But are they hanging out with the same boozy fluidity, are there wild bursts of bad behaviour, are they expecting each day to live up to the ineffable standard of "fun"? Perhaps part of what is so appealing, so fascinating about Mad Men, is the refusal of bourgeois ordinariness, the struggle against it, in all of its poetic, mundane and tragic forms.

At one point, Draper says to his bohemian mistress, who has no children, no husband, no obligations, "I can't decide if you have everything or nothing," and that would be the crucial question. The show seems to be managing, just barely, an existential crisis over ordinary life.

Draper, who suffers so attractively, quotes Frank O'Hara, "Now I am quietly waiting for/ the catastrophe of my personality/ to seem beautiful again." And one wonders if perhaps there is an audience of successful, healthy couples in the new mode, sitting in their bedrooms with flat-screen TVs waiting for just that same thing.

Today's moderately restless or mildly discontented couples go to marriage counselling and "work" on their relationships instead of drinking so much they don't know where they are, or slipping into a back room with someone they meet in a bar. But can we be sure our own malaise and alienation is better than theirs? Are we happier than Don and Betty Draper, or are we just doing yoga or Pilates or "working" on our relationships?

Gay Talese, a scholar and connoisseur of the messy life, remembers people keeping bottles of booze in their desks in the 60s, and recalls coming back from lunch one day and seeing a colleague with his head flat down on his typewriter. No-one touched him for hours, and eventually he woke up. He also recalls copy girls slipping out in the middle of the day with various men to nearby hotels. "You didn't have the word 'exploitation' then," Talese said. "And mostly it wasn't exploitation."

My mother, Anne Roiphe, recently finished a memoir about that same period in the literary circles orbiting the Paris Review. Reading the manuscript I was struck by how much these productive and famous people drank. Today we would dismiss all of these brilliant, narcissistic artists and writers as alcoholics, but back then they were simply charismatic.

I was also struck by how many of the parties she describes devolved into romantic chaos, how easily married men fell into bed with women not their wives. There was a flow to an evening, a sort of dangerous possibility in the air, that would be entirely foreign at the equivalent party now, at which most people go home with the person they are supposed to go home with. I can't help but think the modern reader of my mother's impending memoir will be a little appalled by the casual adultery, the recreational alcoholism, but also just a little bit intrigued; it's like reading about a foreign country. My mother tells the story of sitting on the beach one morning, and my 16-month-old sister climbs onto the lap of a famous movie star and says, "I smell Scotch." Everybody laughs, embarrassed. My mother wonders how many 16-month-olds recognise the smell of Scotch on someone's breath, but by then my sister had clocked a lot of hours sleeping on the bed piled with coats at parties.

I remember being at a Paris Review party at the writer George Plimpton's house nearly four decades after my mother was one of the girls draped across the couch, when he commented dryly, "Those were wilder days when your mother was here."

In Mad Men there is a scene in which Betty Draper is lying in the bath reading Mary McCarthy's novel The Group, and it is McCarthy who, perhaps, wrote the most frankly about the allure, the embarrassment and the comedy of the messy life. In her Intellectual Memoirs, she recalls one 24-hour period in which she slept with three men: "Though slightly scared by what things were coming to, I didn't feel promiscuous. Perhaps no-one ever does."

Once out of curiosity I ran through how much McCarthy drank in a particular night: three daiquiris, two manhattans, a couple of glasses of red wine and then some Benedictine and brandies. These intoxicated and intoxicating nights often involve regret, but she writes about them with such festive humour, that one can see how seductive that messiness would be to the bored Betty Drapers of the world.

Juxtaposed against all this flamboyance, the tameness of contemporary sins can be a little disheartening. We are so busy channeling our energies into doing what is good for us, for our children, into responsible and improving endeavours, that we may have forgotten somewhere along the way to seize the day.

Of course, people still have hangovers and affairs, but what dominates the wholesome vista is a sense that everything we do should be productive, should be moving toward a sane end. The idea that you would do something just for momentary blissful escape is out of fashion.

When we talk about the three-martini lunch these days it is with contempt, with a thrill of superiority. How much more sensible we are than them! "How did anyone get any work done?" someone will invariably ask. But maybe that's the wrong question, or maybe the kind of work they got done was a different kind of work, or maybe that's not the highest and holiest standard to which we can hold the quality of human life.

Of course, it's hard to write in praise of that much drinking in the middle of the day without being perverse; it's equally hard to advocate recreational affairs; it's harder still to defend the four packs of fags a day that Jerry Della Femina smoked in the heyday of his youth.

And yet can these messy lives tell us something? Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our own responsible, productive days? In the 17th century, Andrew Marvell wrote, "But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near." He also wrote: "The grave's a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace." Mad Men also seems in its own stylish way to say: we are bequeathed one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it. Could we use, in other words, in these fine healthy times, just a little of the madness?

• The fourth season of Mad Men begins on Wednesday, 10pm, BBC4.