We’re all maxxing now
On optimizing yourself into oblivion
I wake naturally at 5:47 a.m. to my Hatch Restore 2 ($169.99). Before my feet touch the floor, I drink 16 ounces of room-temperature Acqua Panna, infused overnight with Sakara Beauty Water Drops ($40). I check my Oura Ring ($499 plus $5.99/month). My REM sleep was only 18% — probably because I didn’t take my Seed Daily Synbiotic ($49.99/month) at the right time. I make a mental note to adjust.
My morning skincare takes only 23 minutes and eleven products. I dress in Lululemon Align leggings ($98), Alo Yoga bra ($68), and APL sneakers ($180), then blend my morning smoothie: Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides ($43), Athletic Greens AG1 ($99/month), frozen pitaya, organic spinach, homemade cashew milk.
It’s 7:04 a.m. I’m late for my $38 SoulCycle class. I grab my S’well bottle ($45) and rush out the door.
If you’ve spent any time on TikTok, you’ve likely encountered some version of maxxing. Looksmaxxing. Gymmaxxing. Moneymaxxing. Even “mewing“ — the jaw-positioning thing that teenage boys are doing to sharpen their jawlines. (If you don’t know what mewing is, congratulations on having a life outside the internet.)
But what about the 5 a.m. routine “entrepreneurs”? The “clean girls?” The performative males? The biohackers spending millions to reverse their biological age? They’re all playing the exact same game, perhaps without realizing it.
What unites them isn’t aesthetics or politics or even products. It’s a shared belief that the self is a project to be optimized — and that optimization is the path to security in a world where traditional markers of stability have slipped out of reach.
When you can’t afford a house, you can still afford to be gorgeous. When the economy feels like a casino, at least you can control your body fat percentage. The human body has become the last investable asset, and a multi-billion industry is eager to help you maximize your returns.
How incel-speak became self-care
The term “maxxing” derives from role-playing games. But the cultural usage originated in online manosphere communities, particularly incel forums, in the mid-to-late 2010s. It started with “looksmaxxing”: The idea of raising your “sexual market value” by optimizing your attractiveness.
The suffix “-maxxing” essentially means pushing something to its extreme limit or optimizing it as much as possible, language the New York Times calls a “mechanistic, gamelike aura, as if life were mostly just a web of tactics and hacks and mutual manipulation.”
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The terminology has since exploded across internet culture, somewhat scrubbed of its patriarchal origins. Now you can find scentmaxxing, proteinmaxxing, shoelacemaxxing, fertilitymaxxing, and my favorite, pheromonemaxxing, which involves not showering for days.
The word “performative” has undergone a similar journey. In academic contexts, performativity refers to how actions and language don’t just describe reality — they actively create it. Our repeated acts shape identities and social structures over time.
On the internet, “performative“ has become shorthand for something done for an audience rather than from genuine belief. It’s the broadcasting of a belief system online and identifying with it.
The idea of the “performative male“ involves performative displays of progressivism and emotional sensitivity as a means of superficially appealing to progressive women. “Performative activism” — posting the black square without doing the work.
The “-maxxing” and “performative” modifiers both emerged from spaces with complicated relationships to gender, power, and authenticity — and got rebranded for mainstream consumption (this is known as Digital Subcultural Diffusion Theory).
The hydra of optimization culture
Why does this matter? Because language shapes how we think about things. When we adopt the vocabulary of optimization — of “maxxing” ourselves, of being “performative” — we’re unconsciously adopting a worldview where people are projects to be continuously improved, measured, and perfected.
As the New York Times article aptly said, “The poignant thing about a lot of incel culture is how much the worldview itself seems to exacerbate the problems it claims to describe.”
And that’s true of optimization culture broadly. We optimize because we feel inadequate. The optimization makes us feel more inadequate. So we optimize harder.
All of these trends — looksmaxxing, biohacking, “that girl”, performative wellness, the 5am club, soft clubbing, 9-6-6, the morning routine industrial complex — are expressions of the same thing. The desire to be the most optimal version of yourself.
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Take “maturity maxxing” or “performative maturity” — a trend of appearing overtly adult-like through specific aesthetics: Reading certain books, bragging about early bedtimes, proclaiming disinterest in “youthful” activities like going out.
What sets these posts apart from people who genuinely enjoy a night in is the declaration of it The performance of it. The turning of a lifestyle choice into a visible status marker and source of moral superiority.
One of my favorite Substackers Josh Lora calls it The Mainstreaming of Loserdom — the cultural acceptance among young people of staying home and withdrawing.
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You can trace most aesthetic internet trends to optimization culture, all framing daily life as something to be strategically maximized — whether that’s your morning routine, your appearance, or your biological metrics.
Okay, so you want to be the best version of yourself. But what actually IS the “best version of yourself”? Whose definition are we following?
I’d argue most of these trends center that definition around how productive you are to society — i.e., how much capital you can create, how employable you are, how much you contribute to the economy. “Best self” always seems to mean more efficient, more attractive, more optimized for the market.
Take the biohacking movement: You want to live longer to do … what exactly? Create more shareholder value?
The gamification of the self
We’ve internalized the logic of the market so deeply that we treat ourselves like startups in need of constant iteration. But startups don’t have friends. Startups don’t have community. Startups exist to grow and optimize and eventually exit.
Anne Helen Petersen, whose writing on burnout culture I return to constantly, calls this “the optimization sinkhole”:
“You think you’re standing on solid ground, just scrolling your phone... but then you look up and realize you’re not just trying to make a few things better — you’re dissatisfied with your whole damn life, and have been for some time.”
The language of self-improvement has become, in her framing, a “web of tactics and hacks and mutual manipulation.” Everything can be optimized, quantified, and — crucially — purchased.
You look lonely. I can fix that (for $199.99)
Optimization culture thrives on discontent. And we have a lot of that going around.
As I’ve written about before, we are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. And lonely, disconnected, dissatisfied people are easier to sell to.
This is the engine that makes consumer culture work: aspiration. The gap between who you are and who you want to be. The feeling that something is missing, that you’re not quite enough, that if you just bought the right thing or did the right routine or optimized the right variable, you’d finally arrive.
Petersen nails the mechanism:
“It’s all times, at least under capitalism, which depends on the cultivation of a constant feeling of lack, no matter how much abundance you have received or generated.”
You can never be optimized enough. There’s always another product, another routine, another level, another thing to fix. The goalpost moves every time you approach it. The self-improvement industry depends on you never actually arriving.
Plus, what so many of these trends have in common is that every single step of the optimization journey has a product attached to it.
The “best version of yourself” — as operationalized by these trends — always means more productive, more employable, more attractive to capital. It often never means more rested, more connected, more present, more yourself.
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The metrics we’re optimizing for aren’t ours. They’re the market’s.
Research on social comparison theory shows that upward social comparison — comparing yourself to people who seem “better” than you — is associated with lower self-esteem and increased anxiety. Social media is an upward-social-comparison machine. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.
When the American Dream dies, the body becomes the investment
The answer, I think, is economic — and I’ve written about this at length. The American Dream increasingly feels like a fantasy for young people.
Having kids, saving for retirement, buying a home, upward mobility — all of it has become financially inaccessible for huge swaths of the population.
What emerges from this is “financial nihilism“ the sense that the traditional markers of success are so out of reach that it’s not worth trying. Which feeds into “doom spending” or “little treat culture” — If I can’t afford the big things, why not spend on small luxuries?
As a 27-year-old content creator told Fortune: “When older people ask me how young people are affording nice things they wouldn’t even buy for themselves, I tell them it’s because we can’t afford anything else.”
Bustle said it even more plainly in this fantastic article: “I Can’t Afford A House, So Why Don’t I Just Be Gorgeous?” Below is a TikTok I did on the article:
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The thing is, this calculation isn’t entirely irrational. The beauty premium is real. Attractive workers earn 10-15% more than their less attractive counterparts. They’re perceived as more moral, trustworthy, and capable, and even benefit from what researchers call “beauty perks” — additional workplace benefits and opportunities that aren’t available to everyone.
When you can’t build equity in a house, building equity in your face starts to make sense. The ROI is actually calculable. So we optimize. What else can we do?
Optimizing yourself into isolation
All of this optimization is driven by a fundamental human need — to belong. To fit in. To be liked. To be acceptable.
We’re often not actually optimizing for ourselves. We’re optimizing for how others perceive us. Which is why it’s all so performative — it’s for an audience, even when that audience is imaginary, even when no one is actually watching.
This Karl Marx echoes in my head when I think about this:
“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume — your capital.”
For a more current version, this now famous TikTok.
Marx was critiquing how capitalism reduces life’s richness to mere accumulation. But what’s happened with optimization culture is even weirder: we’re not even accumulating capital in the traditional sense. We’re accumulating ourselves as capital. We’re becoming the asset.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Sarah Bishop describes it as “a paradoxical addiction”:
“The more inadequate we feel, the more compelled we become to optimize, as if we’re chasing a fleeting fix. It’s a paradoxical addiction, where the pursuit of perfection only deepens our dissatisfaction, pulling us further away from genuine fulfillment and connection.”
I, myself, have fallen into the optimization rabbit hole.
Certain seasons of my life were marked by 5 a.m. wake-ups, when I’d drag myself out of bed before dawn because some podcast told me that’s what successful people do.
The productivity systems — I’ve tried them all. The Pomodoro technique, time blocking, habit stacking, digital minimalism, analog comeback, back to digital again. I’ve bought the journals and the planners and the apps. I’ve tracked my sleep and my steps and my screen time.
I’ve optimized my morning routine and my evening routine and my workout routine. I’ve meal-prepped. I’ve done the skincare. I’ve read the books about building habits and breaking habits and atomic habits and tiny habits. I once paid $200 to go into a sensory deprivation tank.
Looking back, the seasons where I was most “optimized” were often the loneliest. I was so busy becoming a better version of myself that I forgot to ask: better for whom? And for what, exactly? I’m still not sure I know.
As one researcher put it: “Self-optimising is desperate because this level of narcissistic self-absorption makes people oblivious to society at large. Profound and systemic issues like the housing crisis... are all buried under daily affirmations about acceptance and calmness.”
We’re so focused on becoming acceptable that we’ve forgotten we might already be accepted — if we’d just show up as ourselves and let people in.
So where does that leave us?
I want to be clear about what I’m NOT saying.
I’m not saying don’t go to the gym. Don’t have a skincare routine. Don’t try to improve. These things aren’t inherently bad. Exercise is good for you. Taking care of your skin is important. Setting goals can be meaningful.
What I AM saying is: notice. Notice when “self-improvement” is actually “performance for others.” Notice when the definition of “optimal” isn’t yours — when it’s been handed to you by an algorithm or an industry or a culture that profits from your dissatisfaction.
Notice when every step of “bettering yourself” requires a purchase. Notice when optimizing is isolating you from the people who would accept you as you are.
The gamification of selfhood has a way of making life feel like a series of levels to beat rather than something to actually live. We’re so busy optimizing that we forget to ask what we’re optimizing for — and whether the answer is actually ours.
HOWEVER: There is on type of “maxxing” I actually think we should be doing. One that runs counter to everything I just described. One that might be the antidote.
More on that tomorrow.
— Hanna
P.S. If this piece resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Hit reply. I read everything.
Never have I been so happy to be so old. I've always treated my body like a commuter car, good enough to get me around, but not a garage-worthy cream puff to be polished and optimized. Part of this cultural shift, I think, is the idea of always being viewed. I was always more interested in looking out than in imagining what others saw when they looked at me. I'm not sure young people have that level of freedom today. There's so much talk about main character energy but a world full of main characters is just a lot of shouting about nothing and being desperate to be seen.
This is was such a powerful piece- thank you for so powerfully articulating what I’ve felt for the past couple of years. I deleted Instagram and TikTok more than 2 months ago because I couldn’t bear being sold something every time I opened one of those apps. I also got to a point a few months ago where I stopped listening to podcasts altogether (unless they were comedic ones like Conan) because they always made me feel like I wasn’t “optimizing” enough - not a good enough partner, not eating enough protein, not sleeping enough … nothing was “enough” and I was a sucker for all of it. I had to step back and really ask myself who I was doing it for and it was eye opening