The tragedy of the maximizer
Remember that insane rage-bait morning routine, dipping your face into ice water, swimming, journalling, doing all the essential steps productivity gurus are on about before it’s even 8 am.
Quaint in hindsight. Adorable. Didn’t even smash his chin with a hammer or shed 15 layers of products lathered onto the face, nor did he take off a corset worn at night to chisel that waist.
You can maximize just about everything now. The feeds are full of it. There is no more balance, only maximizing, whether it’s depression or hedonism or the time you are alive.
Like reading books? That is not enough. One must meticulously track the books read, engage in tsundoku, and make it one’s whole personality. Thankfully, for those who cannot be asked to actually sit down and read, ChatGPT prompts now give you accurate summaries so you can at least fake it (until you make what, exactly?).
Yet, no matter how intricate the prompts might be, a real bookworm will always look through that facade. But the point is not to leisurely enjoy one’s literature. It is to maximize it.
If you think your visual appeal, or lack thereof, is to blame for not having success with the opposite (or same sex), then perhaps it is time to get into looksmaxxing.
Want to be a good slave to capitalism? Just maximize your productivity, center your career, and neglect everything else. Set up a second and third brain so you can avoid seriously using that first to ask yourself: what the fuck?
You are supposed to maximize your wealth, your followers, your impressions, the number of subscriptions for streaming platforms, the number of supplements and peptides you order from questionable Chinese suppliers, the tan you can achieve - even if it means injecting more of said peptides at the risk of ending up in the ER.
You should journal, meditate, travel, capture it all, track your sleep, insert sensors into your vagina to.. vagina-max and have the absolute best biom down there… Do these people ever hear themselves?
Such is the ideology of more. Of more for its own sake. Of maximizing.
The maximizer does not ask, what is the point? Or even, as Marie Kondo would suggest: does it spark joy?
Maxxing is auto-telic. The accumulation, the growth, the enhancement that is all there is to it.
A fictional maximizer
It is chasing infinite growth, fetishizing the act of it, a never-ending journey because.. there is no thing you could not further maximize.
Such is the tragedy.
There is never an enough.
Stopping to evaluate means risking being swallowed by the ever-faster-moving world.
Maxxing as a term might be new; the concept, less so.
Marx feared we would all turn ourselves into commodities and act accordingly; the feed has delivered. Hanna Arendt warned that a life centered only on activity would mean we could never imagine an alternative. We would measure it all and, in doing so, rob ourselves of any remaining mysteries - then turn around and wonder why - if we feel anything at all- it appears so vacuous. Flat.
The logical positivists at least eventually saw that relying only on data was not going to solve anything in the pursuit of philosophy’s big question: what is a good life?
The answer to that depends on where you look.
The ancient Greeks and the elite of the Great Roman Empire, whom we so admire these days, would have scoffed at our obsession with work. For them, leisure, discussion, and thinking were much more worthwhile pursuits.
Of course, leisure is not something our big elites would like us to have too much of - or how else do we explain that, despite all that automation that was supposed to free us from work, we still have to - well, work. We might start wondering how this meritocracy has worked so much in favor of the privileged and less so for those providing other societal merit than building Big Tech companies.
Anyway. Back to maxxing.
It works. For the feeds that love ever-more extremes. Not for what the maximizers are actually trying to do.
That is the tragedy.
They start from a sensible place: that of wanting to better themselves. Maybe even live a good life.
Yet, in doing so, they pick one metric that becomes the all-encompassing goal. They optimize for it to the point of sacrificing many other things that would be useful in the broader pursuit.
Of course, a better life is hard to put into concise metrics.
And thinking hard about what such a life would look like also.
Easy is when someone presents a solution in the form of a product, a regimen, or a routine one can follow - with or without ideology attached (see looksmaxxing’s eugenics heritage).
Classic value capture. We give up on the big for the simple to track and lose sight of what really matters. We get lost in comparing how darkly we tanned, never stopping once to ask: ok are we also skin cancer maxxing here?
We spend all that time in the gym, shooting up ozempic and filling the gaps with hylauronic acid and then wonder why our self-worth is still so low. Even the million followers cannot fix a broken self-image.
The maxxing can never end, as its progressive form implies.
As such, it never arrives anywhere.
The notion often underlying these attempts are familiar to all of us. The thought that: if only this, then I will finally have life figured out.
I will take a wild guess and say that this stage will never arrive.
Why are all our current super-rich so intent on trying to be liked despite their massive success? Clearly not because they reached the stage of “having it figured out.” And yes, I mean people like Elon Musk, who, by all accounts, would be much better off just staying off X and stopping his pathetic attempts at trying to come across as cool. Same goes for the Zuckerbergs of the world trying to convince us they are not… at least careless.
The sooner one realizes that a magical spot never arrives, the better one can figure out what actually matters and what.. sparks joy. Maxxing is almost always about the individual. Never about anything bigger.
It is no wonder then that, by and large, these people are miserable. Or at least not very happy.
People happy in pursuit of one obsession- that is aspirational.
Maximizers sacrificing it all for a chiseled chin, the promised land of finally achieving the necessary superiority to bully others for their lack of said feature - less so.
What is their solipsistic adventure all about? The maximizing becomes the point, the answer to the question they avoid.
Why am I doing this? What am I distracting myself from?
When so much energy goes into maximizing, where doesn’t it go?
Into quiet moments of reflection that could hint at the etiology of one's obsessive maximizing.
A certain striving to overcome is inherent in all of us; indeed, it is necessary for us, born us pretty helpless creatures, in becoming at last a person able to stand on their own. It propels our learning and allows us to gain knowledge and skills
Yet, when this “striving for superiority,” as Adler unfortunately *called it. Still, the second it leaves the healthy bounds we find ourselves in neurotic territory and search an outlet.
That’s what happens with all those maximizers, the relentless optimizers who stop questioning and go as far as measuring their “rests” in terms of how productive they were.
Perhaps it is a lack of self-worth driving them underneath, or the existential undercurrent of dread surfacing upon realizing one’s mortality.
It might be a panicked attempt at trying to fit more into life because if there is one governing limiting factor for all of us - rich or poor, mogging or not - it is that time is running out for all of us.
"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years" - Abraham Lincoln.
*Unfortunately, because as soon as a psychologist or philosopher uses “superiority” or “Übermensch” and such, it is a great find for others to rip it out of context and use it to explain why they should rule over other, lesser beings.
Thanks for reading! 💚