He is “looksmaxxing” (or “taking the black pill”), a practice that started on incel (involuntary celibate) forums built around the conviction that male worth is physically determined and ruthlessly competitive. In that belief system, people exist on a scale called “Sexual Market Value”: a number that ranks attractiveness and determined status and, by extension, dictates what the world owed you.

The suffix “maxxing” migrated (as internet language tends to do) and became a different kind of slang. It sheds its toxic associations with the incel world. Instead, it carried its underlying logic into the world of social media wellness content, productivity culture and self-improvement spaces – as a token of aspiration.

To “maxx” something – whether it’s your face, your physique or your grades – is to extract the highest possible value from it, to treat it as a variable in a system designed to produce the best possible version of you.

@60minutes9 SNEAK PEEK: What is ‘Looksmaxxing’? SUNDAY on #60Mins ♬ original sound – 60 Minutes Australia

Today, variations of maxxing – such as “healthmaxxing” and “grindmaxxing” – sit comfortably alongside cold plunge routines and dopamine detoxes, and almost nobody asks where the framework came from, or what it quietly assumes about what a person is worth.

That question is worth asking. When human value is treated as a measurable metric, competitive, and endlessly improvable, what do we lose?

The inward turn

Maxxing is the modern phenomenon of self-improvement culture. In 1979, American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. In it, he argued that narcissism was a survival strategy against nihilism, a concept that the world was too large and too indifferent to make sense of.

When the book was written, the West was exhaling from its own disillusionment of the stalled civil rights movement, the end of the shameful and meaningless war in Vietnam, and the collapse of the collective idealism of the 1960s.

According to Lasch, when the world’s promises fail loudly enough, people stop investing in them and start looking inwards. The self becomes the only project that feels both controllable and worth pursuing.

Narcissism, the trait of excessive self-preoccupation, was the logical response to a world that had stopped offering coherent meaning in Lasch’s perspective. The turn inward was a withdrawal from a public sphere that had proven itself untrustworthy.

The current generation has inherited its own version of this disillusionment. The modern generation has inherited climate anxiety, institutional distrust, and an algorithmically fragmented public sphere capable of reigniting nihilism.

If the world cannot determine our worth, the body can. If society offers no legible path to significance, the metrics will. Through this lens, maxxing is nihilism with a routine because it replaces the question of what a life is for with a methodology, and methodology sustained long enough can feel like meaning.

To “maxx” an aspect of oneself is to treat it as a token of exchange: the sharpened jaw traded for romantic attention; the optimised schedule traded for productivity; the curated presence traded for status. The self becomes a portfolio whose value is always relative, provisional and dependent on a volatile market.

The psychological toll

Optimisation culture makes a quiet promise that the gap between who someone is and who they could be is closeable. However, the structural problem is that maxxing is, by design, incompletable. There is always a narrower margin, a higher ceiling, another variable that can be maxxed. The logic thereby proliferates.

The downsides can be considerable. Looksmaxxing communities show measurable links to body dysmorphia, a clinical condition in which perceived physical flaws become consuming and debilitating. Gradesmaxxing contributes to an academic culture where students are flattened into a performance indistinguishable from everyone else’s as they fight over the last 1 or 2% at the top grade percentile.

Competition becomes so intense that uniformity is achieved rather than outstanding excellence. Notably, running beneath the optimisation culture is the normalisation of being evaluated. A generation fluent in the language of metrics becomes progressively numb to judgement.

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Inadequacy as commerce

Every ideology needs a financial infrastructure – and maxxing has one too. The wellness aesthetic, disseminated through social media at a scale Lasch could not have anticipated, made the underlying premise of insufficiency palpable enough to monetize at scale. The cosmetic industry sells procedures once confined to clinical necessity as routine investments.

Beyond the metric

Language teaches people how to inhabit the world. When maxxing becomes the default vocabulary for self-development, it reinforces an architecture of the self instead of a mere cultural mood. The parts of existence that resist quantification, such as grief and wonder, have no suffix and thus cannot be “maxxed”. Within this framework of optimisation, they begin to wither.

Lasch saw in 1979 a culture that had lost faith in the future and turned to a territory that still felt governable. The difference now is the scale and speed of such influence. We are being handed a vocabulary that tells us life is a metric, that others are the audience, and that we must therefore perform “well”.

The question worth pondering is not whether maxxing is inherently good or bad, but what kind of person this language is quietly producing, and whether that person will ever feel, by their logic, enough.