“Looksmaxxers…seek to secure chiselled jawlines by bashing their cheeks with hammers”.
I blink. Adjust my glasses, try again.
“Looksmaxxers…seek to secure chiselled jawlines by bashing their cheeks with hammers”.
My brain requests a moment to buffer. Reloads.
Time to turn off the Internet.
I don’t use TikTok, so when I become aware of an internet trend, it’s usually because it has bled so deeply through the fabric of the Internet that it has begun haemorrhaging out into real life conversations. Pity.
After belatedly catching wind of the “-maxxing” fiasco earlier this year, I came across Becca Rothfeld’s brilliant New Yorker piece about looksmaxxing and felt bile rising to my throat as I inched my way through the text. I soon learnt that the suffix “-maxxing” means optimising something–usually yourself–to an extreme limit.
In a time where our ability to make a positive difference is wildly disproportionate to the amount of information we are force-fed about how bad the world is, most of us feel utterly helpless. And so, the tech bro logic sings, we might as well improve ourselves!
But, as Hanna Horvath writes in We’re all maxxing now:
“We’ve internalized the logic of the market so deeply that we treat ourselves like startups in need of constant iteration.”
And we have begun treating our goals the same way. Enter: ambitionmaxxing.
When I was in my first term of university, I stumbled into an event where I found myself peeking through the holes between the heads of fifty very tall, very blonde men. As the very tall, very blonde male presenter began talking, I learnt about the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which claimed to have the answer to solving the world’s most important but underserved problems.
Over the years, my views about EA have shape-shifted a lot; the conclusion I’ve reached is that there is something jarring about the dissonance between the words “effective” and “altruism”. Altruism is an inherently human quality; it is not something you do, but something you are. It is a way of moving through the world. On the other hand, “effectiveness” is a way of doing things, the descendant of a utilitarian value system that prizes efficiency over longevity.
One might argue that I’m missing the point here, that it’s from within this very dissonance that the true vision of EA was born: that we can and should meld these two worlds. But from what the world has witnessed of the demise of corrupt crypto billionaire and EA evangelist Sam Bankman-Fried, it is the very desire “to do enormous good for billions of people” that might be the problem.
On the 80,000 Hours website, a charity closely affiliated with EA that helps people find “fulfilling careers that make a big positive impact”, a callout asks:
How much difference can one person really make?
Answer: Many common ways of doing good, such as becoming a doctor, have less impact than you might first think. Meanwhile, less conventional options can save thousands or even millions of lives.
When you click through, it offers some advice that reeks of ambitionmaxxing: “Instead of asking how to make a difference, ask which careers make the most difference, and how to increase your chances of finding one.”
My parents are both exceptional doctors, and my cousin recently qualified. I am extremely proud that every single day they impact people’s lives in countless tangible and intangible ways that cannot be captured by a reductive formula for “number of lives saved”. I must say I’m deeply thankful neither my parents nor my cousin asked themselves this question at the start of their careers.
The older I’ve got, the more I’ve realised how unnatural it is to want to impact billions of people’s lives. For most of human history, ensuring your own tribe or family’s survival was the pinnacle of achievement. Ambition was survival. And you didn’t stand a chance of not being beaten to a pulp if you went it alone, so you best have a collectivist attitude.
But then, as the Roman Republic dawned, the word ambition–deriving from the Latin ambire–was often used to describe candidates for office “going around” town to solicit votes and political favours. While courtship and flattery were naturally part of this endeavour, the optimist in me likes to believe that ambition still had a fundamentally social component. You needed to understand what your community wanted and how you could best serve them. Sadly, ego and power became the protagonists of the show, but duty and service were still supporting actors.
After ambitionmaxxing my adolescence to fulfil my immigrant-infused childhood dream–getting into Oxford and landing a swanky grad job so I could one day start my own school–I noticed my ambition beginning to ebb imperceptibly, fossilising before my eyes into something I would look back on and wonder: where did you come from and what did you want from me?
But now I realise that my ambition was not eking out of me, like air seeping from a hole in a burst balloon. It was shapeshifting into something more natural, more organic, more sustainable. I’ve found myself becoming less interested in cHaNgiNG tHE wOrLD, as I announced I would do as a precocious tiddlywink. Instead, I’ve become fascinated by how we can meaningfully impact the few lives that dance across our tiny sliver of the world.
Movements like EA are soaked in superlatives. The corners of their patriarchal, utilitarian origins poke out garishly from their website copy:
Moral ambition is the desire to be one of THE BEST, but measured by different standards of success — not motivated by big paychecks, fancy honorifics or a huge corner office, but pursuing a career dedicated to finding the BEST solutions to the BIGGEST problems the world is facing now.*
Using REASON and EVIDENCE to find the MOST EFFECTIVE ways to help others.*
I do believe in the integrity of these intentions and am a particular fan of the work of The School of Moral Ambition. However, espousing that there is a “biggest” problem or a “best” solution, regardless of the empirical evidence that props such claims up, can be misleading.
Having worked in the education and future of work space for almost a decade, I’ve learnt that one of the biggest driving forces behind why people choose to do what they do is their own lived experiences, rather than what the powerful white male mandates.
The empathy that is born from going through something deeply meaningful or traumatic is a fierce motivator for any human. You can tell someone who has lost both parents at a young age that working on the problem of power seeking AI systems is the best way to change the world, but the love and effort they’re going to give that–and therefore the likely success they’ll have–is likely incomparable to the meaning and satisfaction they’d feel if they were to go and work in an orphanage, for example.
Movements like EA ask: what is the most effective use of my time or money as an individual? But this question inflates the significance of the individual far beyond the boundaries of the self. Demanding that you maximise the number of people and problems you can positively impact throughout your career is a very tall order. It feels more realistic to ask people to consider how they might serve their local community, especially at a time when more people than ever are facing unemployment and questioning the relationship between work and meaning.
Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t strive to make a difference. But in trying to stretch our individual impact to the absolute extreme, we often neglect the role we are meant to play on a local versus global level. Some choices and actions, made thoughtfully and executed with integrity, can indeed ripple out to positively impact hundreds or indeed millions of other people. But equally, most people who aspire to make this kind of impact have towering–and often unrealistic–expectations of their capabilities as one tiny human. These people assume their own significance.
Back in 2025, I read this confessional blog post from the founder of Loom, where he writes very openly about the insecurities he experienced upon selling his company and attaining “freedom”. After questioning why he couldn’t just leave Loom and admit to the world I have no idea what to do next, he asks himself:
What is wrong with being insignificant?
In the grand scheme of the cosmos, not one atom gives a toss what we do with our days. And assuming our own insignificance is not the same as believing we do not have agency to influence the world around us. For me, the power of assuming our own insignificance is in helping us realise that we should never do anything for fear of another’s perception, because no-one apart from our closest circle is ever watching or cheering or throwing tomatoes at us.
What I want to propose is a different model of ambition that assumes our own insignificance in a liberating way. This is not an excuse to just throw in the towel and give up on ever doing anything of value. Assuming insignificance simply frees you to do your best work. If we’re all burnt out from the ambitionmaxxing of the 996 work culture, we will probably end up rebelling like UK TikTok employees, rather than focusing our efforts on doing something meaningful for the few people that matter.
Choosing to start with humble rather than towering expectations of the self unlocks a radically different mindset built on collectivism and compassion. Rather than assuming you are best placed to tackle a gnarly global problem for millions of people, you can start by tackling a smaller version of that problem in your community. Over time, this may bubble up into something that extends far beyond your borders. Equally, it may not. Either way, it is a gorgeously worthwhile endeavour.
Even the people who have most radically shifted humanity’s trajectory perish in our collective memory after a few hundred years. The shedding of ambitionmaxxing gives you permission to stop obsessing over outcomes and the breadth of your impact, and start recognising its true depth and meaning.
The model of ambition that sculpted the formative years of millennial and Gen Z lives has begun to fester. And it’s making room for a new sapling to push through the soil of our maturing lives: enough might actually be enough.
*emphasis my own
into some great essays on this topic
We’re all maxxing now by Hanna Horvath
‘Looksmaxxing’ Reveals the Depth of the Crisis Facing Young Men by Thomas Chatterton Williams
The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement by Becca Rothfeld
I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life by Vinay Hiremath
Thank you to my friends AJ and Hanne for meaningful conversations around this essay. This is a veryyyy interesting topic and I’d love to hear what you think. Comment below or reply if you fancy sharing!
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