Life-maxxing: The cost that comes with optimisation

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Influencers on various social media platforms have formed a community online that encourages and promotes an irregular amount of optimisation.

Trends such as ‘beauty-maxxing’ and ‘health-maxxing’ have been on the rise, where people are influenced to monitor, track, and maximise the efficiency of how they ‘do life’ in general.

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What is life-maxxing?

According to The Guardian, the ‘maxxing’ suffix is a decade-old ideology that stems from early manosphere rhetoric that has resurfaced in recent years. The concept of ‘maxxing’ started with the concept of looks-maxing, where men focused on optimising personal appearance through diet, exercise, surgery, or smashing your jawbone.

The concept of life-maxxing blossomed into treating one’s entire personal life as an optimisation project. This then snowballs into various facets of one’s life, from appearance down to personality.

Optimisation as the default

Performing at your optimal level has become the expected level at which you must show up. Look up any diet, self-care routine, morning routine, workout routine, or self-help podcast, and you will not come across simplicity.

You are influenced to strive for things like glass skin, making millions, having optimal mental health, getting 10 hours of sleep, tracking your mood, or eating a high-fibre, high-protein, low-glucose diet.

You are expected to always be at your optimal level, but is that a healthy way to live?

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The cost of life-maxxing

One of the first things lost in an optimal life is joy.

Living starts to feel more like a responsibility than a privilege. When you open your eyes, the checklist starts. You have to get through the morning routine, skincare routine, workout routine, side hustle, nighttime routine, and by the time you fall asleep, you need to check if you did everything.

Writer Ioana Balint shared on Medium, “The constant pursuit of output strips life of its ability to be loved for its own sake.” She explained that even through the erosion of joy, burnout culture still expects you to push through, as emotional numbness has been normalised.

Another cost of life-maxxing is burnout. All these routines, steps, and tasks required to perform life at an optimal level leave very little space for actual rest, not only physically but mentally. These extensive to-do lists, on top of daily life demands, create a huge mental load.

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