The Lifemaxxing Problem

Even divorces have merch now. Of course we’re optimizing.

I’m in the car with eye patches on, audiobook at 1.25, lip treatment on like I’m headed to court (I’m headed to drop off), answering emails at red lights, drinking a fertility shake that tastes like beige regret.

And it hits me, out of nowhere, in the way humiliating truths always do.

I’m maxxing.

Not in the teenage boy way. Not in the “jawline” way. Not in the “mewing” way where kids are apparently training their tongues like it’s a muscle group.

But still.

It started as “I’m just trying to feel better.” Then it became “I’m just trying to keep up.” Then it became this whole silent game where everything in life has an invisible score, and you’re always a little behind.

If you’ve been on TikTok for five seconds you’ve seen it. Looksmaxxing. Gymmaxxing. Moneymaxxing. Scentmaxxing. Aura maxxing. Men’s Health called it the Gen Z and Gen Alpha obsession with “maximizing one’s personal appearance.”
Researchers and universities have tracked how these “looksmaxxing” and “mewing” hashtags rack up billions of views, and how the language is tied to darker corners of the internet even when it shows up looking mainstream and harmless.

The word sounds like a video game because it is a video game.

“Maxxing” comes from gaming slang. It’s basically maximize, the logic behind “min-maxing,” where you build a character by pushing one stat as high as possible and sacrificing others on purpose. You don’t become a better person. You become a more effective build.

Once you clock where the word comes from, you can’t unsee it. It frames life like a game with stats. It suggests there’s an optimal setup. It implies you can hack your way to the outcome if you pick the right traits and grind hard enough.

Which is funny when it’s a teenager trying to sharpen his jawline. Less funny when it’s a grown woman in the carpool lane trying to min-max motherhood.

Because its not just kids. adults are doing it too, we just use prettier words.

We call it routines. Systems. Discipline. Wellness. “Getting serious.” We call it being intentional, which is a gorgeous euphemism for “I’m scared and this is the only lever I can pull.”

And culturally, right now, there are a lot of reasons to feel scared.

Housing still feels like a rigged game, even if you’re doing “everything right.” Reuters is still reporting affordability and high rates keeping the U.S. housing market weak, with builder sentiment sliding because costs are brutal.

And it’s not just money. It’s the constant sense that the world is on fire and you’re expected to keep performing like it’s normal. Trump is back in office, politics are loud again in that specific exhausting way, and the news cycle doesn’t ever land. In Gaza, the humanitarian situation updates keep coming, like an endless series of horrors you’re supposed to absorb before you go make dinner.

Meanwhile loneliness has been upgraded from “sad vibe” to public health emergency. WHO says about 1 in 6 people globally report feeling lonely.

So yeah. In a world where stability is expensive and the feed is relentless, maxxing starts to make a sick kind of sense. If you can’t control the outside, you start controlling the inside. You start tracking. tweaking. optimizing. Because at least that feels like a lever.

So if your world feels like the house is on fire but everyone’s still asking for “wins,” what do you do.

You start treating your body like the last investable asset you have.

You can’t buy a house, but you can buy a red light mask.
You can’t guarantee job security, but you can control your protein intake.
You can’t control the timeline, but you can control your sleep score.
You can’t control whether you’ll get the thing you want, but you can control whether you’re doing “everything right.”

That last sentence is the drug.

Millennials were raised on a belief that was basically a religion: if you work hard enough, you can get anything you want. If you’re disciplined enough, strategic enough, self-aware enough, you can brute force life into cooperating.

What happens when you work hard and it doesn’t happen anyway.

You don’t just feel disappointed. You feel indicted. Like the universe is giving you a performance review, and you missed a step you didn’t even know existed.

That’s where maxxing slides in. It offers this seductive little story: maybe you didn’t fail, maybe you just didn’t optimize correctly yet.

Anne Helen Petersen has the cleanest name for what happens next: the optimization sinkhole. She starts with something banal (finding “the one best way”) and then zooms out, showing how the quest to optimize becomes a sinkhole across bodies, homes, work lives.
You start trying to improve one thing and suddenly your whole life feels like it needs a redesign.

And it’s not just internal. The culture is built to keep you there.

Because once you see yourself as a project, everything becomes shoppable.

Which brings me to the part that makes me the most angry, honestly: fertility-maxxing.

Not because taking care of yourself is bad. Not because prepping is insane. But because this is an area where women are already tender, already blaming themselves, already bargaining with the universe. So of course it becomes the easiest place to sell certainty.

The Cut called it “Trimester Zero,” this expanding pre-pregnancy era where influencers and “experts” push the idea that you should be preparing for pregnancy months before you even try.
Wired has a version of the same phenomenon and even uses the “training like it’s a marathon” framing, which is exactly how it feels when you’re in it.

The dark part isn’t “take a prenatal.” The dark part is the timeline creep. The way the goalposts move backward.

Women already live inside impossible contradictions around fertility and motherhood. Be chill. Be responsible. Don’t wait too long. Don’t panic. Do it naturally but also embrace science. Don’t be obsessive but also relax and let go.

Trimester Zero adds a new way to fail. Earlier.

It’s like culture looked at women and went, you know what this needs? Another layer of pressure, but make it sound empowering and expensive.

Now let me give you proof this isn’t just an internet mood. Brands aren’t late to a profitable emotion, they’re early. They can smell the panic.

Reformation just launched The Divorce Collection with Laura Wasser and a “Dump Him” sweatshirt, four days after Valentine’s Day. Which is extremely telling.

Business of Fashion frames the whole thing as brands “breaking up with the romantic binary to monetise the full lifecycle of love,” trading romance narratives for a lucrative “autonomy economy.” And Reformation’s own exec literally said, “This is not a pivot away from love, but a shift towards autonomy.”

Ok. But autonomy is doing a lot of work here.

Because what this really means in practice is: even the hardest moments of your life are being formatted into an aspirational arc. Not just survive the divorce. Look hot during it. Turn it into a rebrand. Purchase the version of yourself who seems like she’s handling it. In good lighting. With the right sweatshirt.

And it’s not only Reformation. BoF points out cosmetics brands doing the same autonomy-coded pivot too. Rabanne has a “Divorce Party” lipstick. Colourpop put out eyeshadows named “2 Good 4 U” and “Not Your Baby.”
That’s not “just fun.” That’s the whole cultural move in a compact: pain, but make it a product drop.

Because aspiration sells. And nothing sells like telling a woman whose life just cracked open that the win here is becoming “freer, hotter, unbothered.” And like, yes, go be free. But it’s weird that freedom now comes with SKUs.

And if you want the same mechanism without the heartbreak wrapper, look at Erewhon. The $20 Erewhon smoothie era. Business Insider described the Hailey Bieber smoothie like this: “Online, the drink quickly ascended to the mythical—a swirly pink symbol of impossible beauty, hype, luxury, and unattainable wellness.” That’s not a smoothie. That’s wellness-as-status in a cup.This is what I mean when I say kids are calling it maxxing and adults are calling it lifestyle.

Same game. Better PR.

And the thing I can’t stop thinking about, sitting there at a red light with my eye patches and my inbox and my stupid shake, is this:

Maxxing is not about being better. It’s about trying to feel safe in a world that keeps removing safety.

Which makes it rational. And also kind of tragic.

Because the promise underneath optimization culture is always that if you can do life correctly, you can avoid pain. You can avoid uncertainty. You can avoid randomness.

But some of the biggest parts of life do not care how well you performed. They just happen. Or they don’t.

So I’m not going to wrap this up with a “here’s how to opt out” ending, I hate those endings. They’re always lying a little( or trying to sell you something).

I just want to ask the question that keeps bothering me:

When did taking care of myself start feeling like trying to earn protection? And what would happen if we stopped treating our lives like a product we have to keep improving in order to deserve it?