Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Six 2026

These days, my maxxing has reached maximum capacity. Initially, it started with whimsy-maxxing my outfits before I decided to max out other domains of my life. In some domains I have had great triumphs. These are the mundane domains: friendship-maxxing, fiber-maxxing, bedtime maxxing, chore-maxxing, budget-maxxing, and comfort-maxxing among others. You get the idea. In other domains, my maxxing hasn’t been doing quite as well. My current love life is a sad little example of delusion-maxxing, one-sided crush-maxxing and draft-maxxing ten different replies to a single ‘lol’ or ‘lmao’ text that feels too casual to everyone except the person waiting for it. My romantic tribulations aside, ‘maxxing’ is becoming socially endemic even in places where you least expect it. A few weeks ago, outside Arts West, I even encountered an activist who told me they were ‘socialist-maxxing’.

‘Maxxing’ has become so ubiquitous as a verb that we hardly ever hear the term ‘maximum’ thrown around as an adjective or a noun. The genesis of ‘maxxing’ in the existing cultural wave is both humorous and concerning as it evokes images of bone-smashing and thumb-pulling looksmaxxers (think Braden Peters, Clavicular and Kareem Shami—the self-proclaimed ‘godfather of looksmaxxing’). While we may laugh at the absurdity of looksmaxxing, there is something ontologically alarming about this shift from ‘maximum’ to ‘maxxing’. In itself, ‘maximum’ is a banal term. It is a static limit or state of being. ‘Maxxing’, on the other hand, is an ongoing and active process of optimization. It is not a state of being — it is a state of continuous action which completely flips how we view human potential and daily life.

As a child, I loved visiting the Hundred Acre Wood with Winnie the Pooh and my first crush Christopher Robin. I remember Winnie frequently stopping to look at things and appreciating the small details of the woodland. Quite famously, Christopher Robin and Pooh loved doing ‘nothing’. In The House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin even gives us a definition of ‘nothing’, remarking that ‘[I]t means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering’. Maxxing is precisely the opposite of Pooh and Christopher Robin’s delightful nothingness. Instead of sitting on branches and eating honey, we are estranged in the wheel of productivity culture. Instead of maxxing our lives, we are effectively minimizing them. 

This obsession with maximalist productivity isn’t new. ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul’, said Saint Benedict of Nursia in the early sixth century. Even Hegel condemned idleness, emphasizing the interests of society and diminishing the interests of the individual. Other historical figures distinguished idleness from other more valuable forms of leisure. Consider Aristotle’s characterization of scholé, which positions leisure as the condition for learning, or the Romantic defense of poetry as a spiritual and politically necessary form of art. Indeed, in this environment where idleness and productive leisure often crop up, we might ask ourselves: what is new about maxxing?

Unlike previous didactic, poetic and philosophical characterizations, maxxing is very trendy. While we do not openly prescribe maxxing as a lifestyle (except for looksmaxxers) there is something very powerful in how it discursively contaminates our lives. Our initial obsession with maxxing started as seemingly harmless satire, from analogue-maxxing to joy- maxxing. Very soon, the ethos of the term began to be thrown around commercially. Without knowing it, many of us have started taking maxxing seriously. Platforms like Blinkist now offer us 15-minute summaries of books ranging from Dickens’ David Copperfield to Dostoevsky’s  The Idiot  so we can max out our Goodreads goals. Even if we don’t use platforms like Blinkist or AI-generated summaries, there is something telling about the rise of maxxing and practices like shallow reading (I discussed this in an earlier Farrago essay titled What Book club taught me about the Reading Crisis and Anti-Intellectualism for those interested!) 

Last year, I was surprised by how many LinkedIn-maxxers had finished anywhere between 70 to 100 books, many of which were notoriously complex narratives such as Anna Karenina and Swann’s Way. As a dedicated reader myself, I was astonished by how these people who had full-time jobs managed to fly through complex narratives that demand time and patience. I was concerned about whether they actually felt the impact of these layered narratives, or whether  Anna Karenina had become yet another example of intellect-maxxing for performative display.

In other places, the maxxing ethos is prevalent in more subtle ways. The “academic weapon” trend on Instagram is a good example, bombarding users with Pinterest-curated study images that aestheticize spending hours in the library and promise romanticized hyper-productivity. Of course, in other terrains “maxxing” is shoved straight to our face. Consider the emergence of apps such as Maxxing: Face Beauty Analysis, which promises users “No compliments, no hate — just a clear breakdown of how your appearance actually comes across to others.” (Yay! I can finally figure out how attractive I am!).

Arguably the  most concerning aspect of maxxing is that it makes our lives quantifiable. Instead of living our lives, we can measure them numerically, much like T. S Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock who has “measured out my life with coffee spoons” (he’s coffee-spoon maxxing!)  Of course, Prufrock is a sad little character, and Eliot is careful enough to not epitomize this over-thinking, over-intellectualizing being. Yet, in a way, we ourselves are becoming increasingly Prufrockian with this  maxxing imperative. I can measure my beauty with AI-scanners, my popularity through my number of Instagram followers, my intellect by  my Goodreads data, and my desirability based on my  number of Tinder likes or dates. Maxxing is packaged up with anxiety because it always suggests a lack or a deficit: maybe I am not pretty enough, or sexy enough, or clever enough, or funny enough. Perhaps I lack aura. Maybe I need to ‘lock in’ (another term soaked in hyper- productivity) and start ‘aura farming’ (I may or may not have felt these things before, as all of us probably have). 

In this way, maxxing doesn’t just quantify our actions, quantifies our sense of self, and this isn’t  presented as discriminatory. According to these maxxers anyone could and should max. Regardless of the conditions that shape my life I can still maxx because maxxing  is presented as an accessible fantasy to all. Oftentimes, people around me assume that I would be the last person on earth who falls victim to the maxxing imperative. Perhaps there’s something quintessentially anti-maxxing about wicker-baskets (I carry one around on a daily basis) and an English and Philosophy degree. Funnily enough, I have been an intense victim of the maxxing imperative. As a bookish woman whose reputation in high school was tokenistically “clever” (I personally don’t resonate with the term) there is something very disturbing about watching that identity becoming measurable as it is reduced to reading statistics, productivity metrics, and intellectual performance data. Indeed, the very qualities that once felt organic to me now risk becoming another domain to optimize. It kills curiosity and the consistent   desire to slow down because there is something profoundly anti-maxxing about simply saying “I can’t understand something” or “I’d like to enjoy the process rather than the product”.

Maybe there is another angle to the maxxing imperative. It not only suggests a sense of lack and deficit, but it also makes “not being enough” uncomfortable and a source of deep shame. I have felt this in my personal life where, after Instagram reel-maxxing, I start feeling uncomfortable about my own selfhood and wishing I was more attractive, more aura-ful, more main-character energy, had more rizz, or  anything else Instagram content is prescribing. Just recently, I was having a conversation with a friend about “Helicopter” and “Tiger” parents. “How much can you demand from a single person?” she said bitterly, condemning the relentless demand for success. In a landscape, where maxxing is maximized in our vocabulary (even humorously), we run the risk of treating ordinary human limitations as a debilitating form of personal failure. Rest, confusion, slowness, and imperfections have become defects rather than the necessary conditions of being alive and part of the process of evolving as human beings. 

Failure to maxx becomes a source of individual inadequacy in a world where everything has become a statistical data point. Perhaps that’s the reason why I am more comfortable draft-maxxing ten different replies to a “LOL” and “LMAO” text without stepping into the vulnerability of explicitly initiating a date or giving a bold sign instead of subtle signals. And maybe that’s the unspoken tragedy of the maxxing  imperative – it promises us a bigger life despite making us smaller and weaker on the inside. Indeed, when I sat down to write this piece, I made the promise of attempting to delegitimize  maxxing as a way of life. However, I’m aware of the irony inherent to using the -maxxing suffix to describe my own experiences in this article, which others have also adopted to critique the whole trend in a tongue-in-cheek way online. Perhaps in this way, maxxing was always meant to be  ironic, because even resisting it becomes another form of participation. I guess the only real counter-maxxing is not to argue against maxxing, but to live in ways that refuse to be measured — to take great leaps and suffer painful falls without the worry that we are falling behind on some non-existent scoreboard. We need to spend more time being Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, lingering in pleasant  nothingness and allowing ourselves to notice the people who remind us of what an un-maxxed life can feel like.