Karly
There was a time when you could simply go to sleep. You didn’t have to sleepmaxx, mouth-tape yourself, monitor your temperature, calculate your ideal bedtime backwards from the moment you needed to wake up, or buy a ring that would inform you, with the gravitas of a medical professional, that the sleep you thought was perfectly decent was actually catastrophically inefficient. You could eat vegetables without fibremaxxing, go for a walk without turning it into zone two training, and wash your face without having to decide whether the shape of your jaw represented a failure of discipline. Now, apparently, everything we do is merely the underdeveloped version of something we could be maxxing.
The suffix itself is doing an extraordinary amount of work. To “max” something once meant reaching the upper limit of a quantity, usually one that could actually be measured, but “maxxing” has become a cultural philosophy, a way of approaching the self as though it were an unfinished product with poor quarterly results. Looksmaxxing is perhaps the most obvious example, with its endless hierarchies of facial harmony, eye shape, bone structure, body fat percentage and whatever else a stranger with a podcast microphone has decided is biologically destiny this week, but the logic has escaped the darker corners of the internet and attached itself to almost every part of life. We’re healthmaxxing, wealthmaxxing, studymaxxing, careermaxxing, dopamine-maxxing and relationship-maxxing, as though a relationship were a video game character whose statistics could be improved if we selected the correct dialogue options.
Even when the actual word “maxxing” isn’t used, its logic is everywhere. Morning routines promise to transform us before 8 a.m., skincare routines contain enough active ingredients to qualify as lab work, and holidays have to be researched, documented and optimised so thoroughly that lying beside the pool begins to feel like a shocking misuse of resources. Hobbies are expected to become income streams, bodies are expected to become projects, and homes are expected to become visible evidence that we’ve understood ourselves correctly. We can’t just own a chair because we like it, it has to communicate our aesthetic, and we can’t just read because we’re interested in a book, we need a reading goal, a tracking app and a colour-coded annotation system that can be photographed from above.
It’s tempting to blame social media for all of this, and social media obviously hasn’t helped, but I don’t think the urge to optimise ourselves began with TikTok. What social media has done is give the urge a vocabulary, an audience and an endless parade of people who appear to have succeeded, while the deeper idea is much older and much more pervasive, namely that a person is valuable because of what they produce, how they look, what they own and how efficiently they move through the world. Maxxing culture is simply this belief dressed up in internet language, made funny enough to repeat and casual enough that we don’t always notice how bleak it is.
There’s something faintly industrial about treating every part of a human life as a system that needs to deliver maximum output, because the body becomes a machine, attention becomes a resource, and time becomes something we’re constantly warned not to waste. Even pleasure is expected to justify itself through a secondary benefit. Walking is good because it improves cardiovascular health, reading is good because it expands our vocabulary, travelling is good because it makes us more culturally aware, and friendship is good because it reduces loneliness and might even help us live longer. None of these claims is necessarily wrong, but taken together they reveal how uncomfortable we’ve become with doing anything that cannot be translated into evidence of improvement.
We’ve reached a point where rest is rarely allowed to remain rest. It’s recovery, which sounds reassuringly productive because recovery exists in service of returning to work, sleep is performance-enhancing, meditation improves focus, and a bath regulates the nervous system. Even doing nothing has been rebranded as a deliberate act of wellness, complete with instructions, products and the subtle threat that we might somehow be doing nothing incorrectly. There’s always a better pillow, a more effective supplement, a more scientifically sound breathing pattern, and somebody eager to tell us that our bodies have been operating below capacity for years.
The cruelest part is that maxxing culture doesn’t really allow for a finish line, because you can’t complete the project when the project is you, and there will always be another habit to adopt, feature to correct or deficiency to uncover. The moment one concern has been addressed, the algorithm provides another. Perhaps your skin is clear now, but is it glowing, perhaps you’re exercising, but are you building enough muscle, perhaps you’re eating well, but have you considered your cortisol, and perhaps you’re happy, but are you happy in the most efficient possible way?
This is why so much of the language around self-improvement feels less like encouragement and more like surveillance, as though there’s a second self standing beside us at all times, clipboard in hand, recording whether we’ve made the optimal choice. That second self notices the wasted morning, the missed workout, the unproductive hobby and the face that hasn’t been properly sculpted through massage, injectables, strategic chewing or sheer force of will, and it turns daily life into a series of tiny assessments, making contentment feel suspiciously like complacency.
Of course, there’s a reason this culture appeals to people, and it would be lazy to pretend everyone has simply become vain or obsessed with productivity. The world feels unstable, institutions feel unreliable, and many of the things that determine the shape of our lives are beyond our control. You can’t personally fix the housing market, guarantee financial security, eliminate discrimination or ensure that your career will progress according to plan, but you can buy a new serum, reorganise your morning routine and drink a very specific amount of water from a very large bottle. Optimising the self can create the comforting sensation that life is manageable, that every problem has a protocol, and that every anxiety can be converted into a checklist.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve something. Sometimes habits do help, sometimes a better skincare routine makes your skin feel better, lifting weights makes you stronger, or putting your phone in another room allows you to sleep. The problem begins when improvement stops being a tool and becomes an obligation, when every part of life is evaluated according to whether it’s moving us towards a superior version of ourselves. There’s a difference between caring for yourself and treating yourself like an underperforming employee.
Perhaps that’s what bothers me most about maxxing culture, the way it leaves so little room for the ordinary. Ordinary beauty, ordinary health, ordinary ambition and ordinary happiness have all begun to sound like failures of imagination. We’re encouraged to believe that there’s always a more optimised life available just beyond the next purchase, routine or revelation, and that accepting anything less means we’ve failed to unlock our potential. Potential, in this context, is less a hopeful possibility than a debt we’re told we owe to our future selves.
But a life isn’t wasted simply because it hasn’t been maximised. A hobby doesn’t need to become a business, a face doesn’t need to become a before-and-after photograph, and a day doesn’t need to be productive, aesthetically coherent or narrated for an audience. Sometimes you’re allowed to eat because you’re hungry, sleep because you’re tired, read something slowly, and wear an outfit that doesn’t belong to a named aesthetic. You’re allowed to enjoy things without extracting every possible benefit from them.
Maybe the opposite of maxxing isn’t neglect or laziness, but enoughness, the increasingly unfamiliar belief that not every element of the self requires intervention. Enoughness doesn’t mean we never change, learn or want more, it simply means there are moments when we’re allowed to stop auditing our existence and live inside it instead. In a culture determined to turn us all into endless renovation projects, accepting that some things are already fine might be one of the few forms of resistance we have left.
