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2026-09-22

Maxxing

Maxxing treats life as a problem when it’s a mystery | Psyche Ideas

Where might the scientification of the good life lead us? In recent years, this relatively innocuous application of science to life has curdled into something grotesque. We are now in an era of what Gen Z calls ‘maxxing’: internet slang for ruthlessly quantifying and optimising social or physiological traits in pursuit of better social standing or lifestyle. The most notable figure is Clavicular (real name Braden Eric Peters), the figurehead of ‘looksmaxxing’, a sub-genre of maxxing that urges people, usually young men, to optimise their physical proportions and facial structure to meet ideal standards. The purpose of looksmaxxing is to ‘mog’, or dominate other men by being more attractive. Common interventions include smashing the jawbone to achieve facial symmetry, self-prescribed methamphetamine to manage weight, and the injection of peptides for supposed skincare benefits.

In The Philosophy of Existentialism (1956), Marcel offers a critique of modernity. It begins with a simple observation: the modern world appears broken in the way a machine appears broken. Science affords us the ability to understand how something works, to set standards of ideal function, and therefore to know when things fall short. Brokenness becomes an essential feature of this world. For Marcel, this tendency to see the world as broken eventually turns inward. We come to see ourselves as nothing more than an ‘agglomeration of functions’ (physiological, social, even economic) that adhere to scientifically determined standards amenable to restoration, preservation or enhancement.

This changes the way we approach life. Whether it’s getting your 10,000 steps in a day, cultivating a healthy relationship with your family members, or meeting your KPI’s at work, life becomes governed by what Marcel calls a ‘vital schedule’ designed to repair, regulate, even optimise these functions. Hospitals, once understood as places of care, attentiveness and solidarity in the face of suffering, become repair shops. Workplaces, once sites of vocation, craft and communal purpose, become sites of efficiency. Even my daily naps are tweaks to my own vital schedule. Marcel’s warning is that total immersion in functionality excludes something: ‘this world is, on the one hand, riddled with problems and, on the other, determined to allow no room for mystery.’

Marcel’s key observation is this: ‘having’ is always a temporary excursion from ‘being’. As Marcel puts it in Being and Having (1949), ‘having tends, not to be destroyed, but to be sublimated and changed into being.’ Like dams that break the flow of water, the act of ‘having’ involves what Marcel calls ‘a kind of suppressed dynamic’. I can posit my body as an object for me, then work on it as if it were a broken machine, but I always have to return to my body as something to live in. The dam of ‘having’ my body as something to work on always breaks. This return to being is not incidental but structural: ‘being’ sustains ‘having’, the mystery of living will always encapsulate the solving of problems.

The scientification of the good life overlooks this. It promises a world of pure ‘having’, dictated entirely by diagnosing and solving problems. But the inevitable moments of return, in which the attitude of having and solving problems reverts to the mystery of being, puncture this fantasy. The life that we return to after tweaking it from afar still has to be lived, to be inhabited, and whatever this style of living is, it cannot be served by scientification. For Marcel, the maxxer’s tragedy is not that they are wrong about the value of optimisation, but that they have narrowed their existential horizon exclusively to problem-solving. Instead of trying to fix the mystery of being, maxxers should be finding ways to be at home in it.

2026-09-21

Unclenching

what unclenching feels like for me

This is a good list - a reminder for me to watch out for such signals.

Meditation

Average moments of a long-term meditator

Another similar article that struck out to me because I guess that's the kind of headspace I am in.

I keep thinking I need to take an entire year off to build up the rhythms I feel I need for long term wellness and health benefits. Meditation would be one of the things to pursue in that time.

2026-09-18

The Art of Managing One-Sided Conver

‘But enough about you …’ How to survive in a world of monologuists, interrupters and trauma dumpers

There is a name for this type of egocentric behaviour – “conversational narcissism”. Although it was coined by the sociologist Charles Derber in his 1979 book The Pursuit of Attention, the term seems more relevant than ever. “WhatsApp communication and voice notes are really a series of monologues,” says Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist. “In face-to-face situations, people are forgetting how to pause naturally, to make space to hear and listen. And people are chatting on the phone – an activity that at least requires turn-taking in a defined way – much less often.”

A lot of our communication online can feel weirdly transactional, focused on logistics or niche WhatsApp groups. According to Tamu Thomas, a life coach and author, this has damaged the art of improvised conversation. “People have less capacity for meandering conversations that don’t have a purpose,” she says. “A good dialogue is a back-and-forth between two people discovering new things about each other, even if they have known each other for years. Because there are now so many different channels available to stay in touch, some people are confusing communication with connection.”

Knowledge is power, though. If you can recognise the five types of common conversation hogger, it will be much easier to handle them.

the summary of the different categories from the accompanying newsletter

Fortunately, Chaudhuri also offered tips for how to deal with some of the worst conversational offenders, including:

• The serial monologuist. The real crime of the monologuist, says psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber, is not simply dominating the conversation – it is that “they often select topics that are not necessarily meaningful for anyone else.” Think: the time their baggage got lost at the airport, or their kids’ orthodontia. To handle this, try redirecting the chat without shutting the person down. Something like: “That’s really interesting, and it reminds me of….”
• The trauma dumper. This is the person who overshares without listening to others, and who dominates social gatherings with long discourses about the most intimate details of his life. Chaudhuri spoke to one therapist who suggested encouraging this type of person to reach out during the good times, not only the crises.
• The boomerasker. The term refers to people who ask a question simply so that they can answer it themselves. One approach is to give vague, short answers and then ask them the question back with more enthusiasm – that way you haven’t wasted time sharing. Or, you could boomerask them yourself and see how they like it.

the other two categories - the interrupter and the care bear

I am mostly a listener, so I have a tendency to let these kind of people go on. I have had to put up with a lot of serial monologuists and trauma dumpers, but not so much the boomeraskers.

2026-09-14

Just bury your trash

Just bury your trash - Works in Progress Magazine

It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases.

The best case for recycling is where the materials themselves are scarce, and we can more cheaply reuse them than finding more of them. Batteries and electronics contain metals like copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel. While we are not about to run out of any of these materials globally in a strict sense, their supplies are limited in practical terms. Plenty of copper ore remains in the ground, but it is getting harder and more expensive to extract as the highest quality and most accessible deposits have been depleted. In the case of cobalt, lithium, and nickel, production is geographically concentrated, meaning countries without natural supplies of their own have an interest in recycling in order to limit their dependence on imports. All of these, especially copper and nickel, are highly recyclable, with little loss of quality over multiple reuses. For these, recycling is sensible.

By contrast, there is no danger of running out of paper. We can always grow more trees, and that is in fact a decent way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. The silicon used to make glass is one of the most abundant elements on Earth.

2026-09-11

2026-09-10

Testing some changes

Test. Let's go.

2026-09-09

Is sexual attraction overrated

Is sexual attraction overrated?

The stratification of individuals into different value levels or ‘leagues’ within dating, based upon their perceived beauty, intelligence and career success, is a brutal reality of today’s relationship culture – one which K is actively rebelling against to assert their own value beyond looks. “As a mid- to plus-size person, depending on my weight fluctuation, it’s rare for an attractive person to also be into me. I used to hold conventionally beautiful people’s attraction to a high value and be like, ‘Oh, this really attractive person is attracted to me, so I should hold onto this relationship.’”

With the way that beauty culture intertwines with white supremacy, ableism and patriarchy, as both a reflection of these values and something which can perpetuate them, it’s worth scrutinising our own preferences in partners and what they might mean. Leanne Yau, a polyamorous relationship educator, has already witnessed some of this work being carried out within the non-monogamous community. “As a polyamorous person, something that I often deal with on the internet is people perpetuating the stereotype that polyamorous people are ugly, and it’s something that I’ve really put a lot of effort in pushing back against,” she says. 

Yau argues that gravitating towards people who don’t embody traditional beauty standards is a way of undermining the (often discriminatory) social biases about who is deserving of love. “We place a lot of emphasis, as a society, on how conventionally attractive and, therefore, how valuable someone is, to determine their overall desirability or worthiness of being in a relationship,” she explains. “I think that queer people, polyamorous people, people who have questioned relationship norms in general, are much more likely to decentre conventional attractiveness in their dating lives because we want to push against those norms.”

2026-09-03

What will be scarce

What will be scarce? #ai #work

Economics is the study of decision-making under constraints, i.e., scarcity. If advanced AI brings material abundance—if machines can produce many if not all forms of human production at very low marginal cost—does economics become irrelevant? No, we will still have scarcity, but the kind of scarcity that matters will change. Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce. After answering that question, the rest of the analysis is pretty straightforward. In this essay I’m going to explore what becomes scarce when automation can replicate many if not all human production, and what that may mean for the types of jobs that emerge.

After Work, We’ll Have Each Other

Very interesting take on work. I was drawn in by the quote: Once you realize what that means, you’ll be giving two cheers for the American work ethic.

Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.

This is why so much contemporary discussion of work and meaning is misguided. It’s very clear that humans don’t need work or anything like it to live meaningful lives. Nor do we need the things that people who talk about “meaning” mean — individual self-actualization, personal growth, serving a greater purpose. We can get by just fine without any of them, as historically most of us have. What we absolutely can’t live without is a social framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of our society and gaining the respect of our peers. The most important thing work gives us — after money, of course — is an alternative way to meet those needs. Not all jobs are pleasant or rewarding, but all of us benefit from living in a system where we can earn respect and dignity as adults from what we do, not who we know, or who we are.

And this is exactly what we see when we look at what Americans actually get out of work.

love the way it ends

This brings us back to what we already know: The modern labor market has dissolved the bonds of tradition, family, and clan. In the modern world, relationships matter less. And because they matter less, we can do much more inside them. They are freer. They have room to breathe. 

As with so many things, the Scottish Enlightenment understood this first.11 The possibility of friendship in a commercial society was a serious concern for Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson. Specifically, they believed that commercial society made friendship possible. In the bad old days before impersonal markets and bureaucracies, the only way to survive was through personal ties to allies or to kin. As a result, every personal relationship was transactional.

When we can all support ourselves by our own labor, these transactions are no longer necessary. For Smith, the absence of necessity created room for a better form of friendship, based on “natural sympathy” instead of mutual need. This sympathy between individuals would in turn serve as the basis of a more universalist social morality, not bound to the competing needs of feudal institutions or family groups.

Our attitude to work is just one part of the historical transition to a liberal, democratic, individualist culture, but it is an important one. Today, work makes our personal independence materially possible. But even if our material needs are met, relying on our personal relationships to meet all our needs for identity and belonging creates a similar kind of dependence. We can see it in Ostrander’s ladies: When we take away more impersonal forms of work from the rest of the package, the older ties reassert themselves.

I’m not certain that that’s what we’re facing now. I said that I don’t like making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change, and I meant it. If a more relational world is the most serious problem AI causes, I’ll certainly be relieved. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it. I like my job, and I like liberal individualism. If the former will one day be a casualty of progress, I hope the latter will survive it.