The Case Against Maxxing

Maxxing started in the darkest corners of the internet. Looksmaxxing took shape in incel forums during the 2010s as a system for maximizing physical attractiveness, built on the blackpill premise that human worth is a number and the number can be optimized. From there the suffix spread: gymmaxxing, moneymaxxing, statusmaxxing, sleepmaxxing. By the early 2020s it had landed on TikTok and bled into mainstream self-improvement culture, stripped of its original ideology and repackaged as something neutral, even aspirational.

You don't have to participate in any of that to be running the same logic. The optimization impulse is much older than the meme and much broader than the subculture. I am not the typical looksmaxxer; I am tall, androgynous, naturally drawn to aesthetic and contemplative things in a register that has nothing to do with bone structure rankings. But I have been fixated on beauty my entire life, and on competence, and on impact, and on refining all of it toward an ideal I never actually reach. I never used the label, but I was living by the same structure.

Why it works

Maxxing is seductive for a specific reason that has nothing to do with vanity. Life as an optimization problem has too many moving parts pulling on each other, and the returns come back slow, vague, unmeasurable. Maxxing collapses all of that. Suddenly there is one thing to get right: one metric that tells you whether you are winning. The feedback loop tightens, the low hum of not knowing how to spend a life narrows to a single note, and in a world this uncertain that is an enormous relief.

The response makes sense, but it solves the wrong problem.

What broke the spell

The thing that forced me to see it was AI, an ironic place to find a doubt about whether work belongs at the center of a life. The pace of change lit up a few assumptions I had been running without ever checking: that large exits convert into specific lifestyles, that high valuations become liquidity, that money and fulfillment keep climbing together at the far end. Looking at the people at that far end, I find little evidence for any of it. The seeking doesn't stop once the exit clears.

I also did a budgeting exercise: I literally calculated what the life I actually want costs. The number came out smaller than the target I had been optimizing toward. Embarrassingly smaller. A phantom target had been running the whole thing for years and I had never once asked where it came from.

What the founder path actually costs

The founder path is the clearest case. You don't need to run a trillion-dollar company to see what it actually costs. Most people would rather not see it, or have other drives (ego, the hunger for validation) that make sure they never do. But the disconnect arrives early. As early as pre-seed, seed, Series A, depending on how serious the business is, you are already deep in the politics, the bootlicking, the stakeholder management: all the things you allegedly became a founder to escape. And it only compounds. There is no guaranteed liquidity event at the other end of it.

What I value is building, having genuine impact on the product, operating without excessive bullshit, keeping my freedom and my privacy. The path that is supposed to deliver those things starts removing them almost immediately and never stops. I am not trading that for a number I have already worked out I do not need. I can rent a boat.

This has given me a real and renewed respect for more ordinary paths: businesses you can touch, cafes, commerce, even a regular job done with actual care and intention. Not mindless salaryman existence; the passion and the quality of what you build are up to you, not the tag or the flavor of maxxing attached to it.

There is no rubric

The flaw goes beyond life having multiple metrics and one costing you the others. There is no rubric. No right amount of money, no right lifestyle, no correct template for a life. Beyond a few very general things (be healthy, be kind, be reasonably happy) the rest is entirely yours: what you want, what you find meaningful, what kind of journey you want to be on.

And even that framing is slightly off, because the results you want and whether you get them are not the whole story either. Sometimes not getting what you wanted hands you something better, and you only find that out years later, if at all. You cannot measure what the other path would have given you looking forward, and you cannot measure it looking back either.

Spend a long stretch in a new country and there is no right itinerary. A big budget and the best hotels do not guarantee the most interesting experience. A stripped-back bike trip does not guarantee it either. There is only the journey you actually took.

That is not a reason to throw it all out. I know what I like and I go after it, not only for the results but because I find the process worthwhile. It is a reason to be suspicious of the maxxing frame and its premise that any of this is mainly an optimization problem, and that the right move is to find the correct metric and pull on it as hard as you can.