Can we stop maximizing everything? The obsession with -maxxing has gotten out of hand: perhaps we should rediscover the pleasure of doing things halfway

I consider myself a moderately lazy person. I practice physical activity, but without overdoing it. I like to eat healthy, but I also like to get rid of a few whims. To be honest, I live a life suspended between to-do lists and procrastination. If there were nominations for the perfect testimonial of -maxxing, I certainly wouldn't apply: I represent the emblem of someone who starts something - an eight-season TV series, macramé, or a new beauty ritual - and promptly leaves it halfway through the process. I often blame myself for this lack of dedication to practices and hobbies, but looking around me - at a time when everything is transformed into performance - I tell myself that, perhaps, knowing how to do things in half is proving to be an enviable ability.

What is -maxxing

But let's take a step back: what does -maxxing mean? Born in the most obsessive corners of the Internet, the suffix -maxxing derives from the English verb to max out, that is, “to do the maximum”. At the beginning, it circulated mainly in the male incel communities linked to looksmaxxing, the set of strategies - from training to skincare, to the most invasive aesthetic interventions - designed to optimize their physical appearance and increase their “value” on the dating market. Over time, however, the term has ceased to belong to that niche and has colonized every aspect of daily life. Today we talk about proteinmaxxing to increase protein intake, fibermaxxing to get more fiber, sleepmaxxing to optimize sleep, brainmaxxing to improve cognitive performance and even joymaxxing, the attempt to squeeze the maximum happiness out of every experience. The basic idea always remains the same: if something can be optimized, then it must be pushed to its limit.

When well-being also becomes performance

By itself, the concept doesn't seem wrong. Looking for the best version of yourself or wanting to perfect yourself in a certain activity is plausible, even desirable. Until it becomes an obsession that seeks to optimize every single area of our lives: nutrition, sleep, training, relationships, productivity, even leisure. It's not enough to do something anymore: you have to do it as efficiently as possible. So going out for a walk turns into the mandatory goal of at least 10,000 steps a day, the quality of sleep into an obsession to monitor and increase at any cost, self-care into a long and expensive routine that often involves cosmetic surgery, more or less invasive. And then? What will be the next step? Because the idea that there is always a better version of ourselves makes it impossible to feel 'enough'. If you can always add a supplement, a habit, a sport or an aesthetic retouch, then you will never reach the finish line: in this way, optimization becomes an endless process.

Learning to be enough

This is why we should learn to reevaluate the art of being content, of failing, of doing things halfway. Going for a run for only 3 km, maybe slowly, is still a race. Remembering yourself every morning to put on moisturizer and sunscreen is already taking care of your skin. Reading five pages of a book every day is better than never opening it. The real -maxxing we would need is enough. What reminds us that we don't need to finish every TV series we start, transform every passion into a project or optimize every gesture of the day. Some things can remain unfinished, slow, even mediocre. And that is precisely what makes them human.