Working as a cook and the art of cooking have very little connection for the first 5 or 10 years of your career and most 30 year olds, even, probably aren't willing to put in what it takes, physically, to work their way up in the food business. Even as a chef, you'll spend 95% of your time managing a highly complex production line that can crank out identical units on demand and if you're lucky, 5% on creativity. You'll rarely, if ever, want to cook for pleasure. It's kind of a meme among cooks how most of them end up eating hot pockets and
microwaving frozen pizza on their days off.
There are some people who I usually encourage to become line cooks. People in their early twenties who are toughened up a bit by life, intelligent, passionate about food, don't have skills that will yield them a financially viable but less punishing career path, kind of lost, and seem capable of self-regulating around alcohol and other substances. That's a rare bird, especially in the HN crowd.
Having known many hundreds of service industry workers, I do know one person who got into restaurant cooking as a fully-matured adult and didn't dejectedly leave it within a year or two. Importantly, he graduated culinary school in his twenties, worked in other service industry jobs for a few decades after, and despite also being a professional musician, didn't drink or use hard drugs. It's hard to emphasize to most people how important that last part is. I briefly worked at a well-respected, fun, vibrant, relatively pricey restaurant with an open kitchen that did 100 covers per hour on Saturdays. They wanted the customers to think the cooks were having a ton of fun, so a six pack was part of our station prep and customers could buy beer for the line at a discounted price. I have no idea how that line afforded so much cocaine on such a small salary but that was some scarface shit. Uppers are borderline a safety requirement when you're drunk and always seconds away from permanent disfigurement. A guy I know who cooked there for like 5 years went in kind of dorky and is still a slurring-every-night drunk decades later. The first night I worked there I saw my boss passed out drunk sleeping on the floor of a nearby ATM. A few years before that, a good friend and consummate drinking buddy was looking for a big change so I connected him with a third shift job cooking at a 24 hour restaurant. The most consequential things he picked up from it was an intravenous drug habit and a new career as a drug dealer.
I love Kitchen Confidential but I do think he glamorized that grittiness to some extent. From the outside it seems a little exciting and everybody likes to think they're just dangerous enough to ride it or upstanding enough to stay above it, but that's pretty naive thinking. I just don't think most folks used to living in polite society can grasp the negative implications of that lifestyle. For many of those people, those coping mechanisms are all they've got, and sadly, these jobs will let people rely on them until they're dead.