Redefining Winning: Instinct vs Optimisation

Sometimes used jokingly, but more often not, maxxing culture is the new internet phenomenon sweeping across everyone’s FYP. Whether you're ‘protein-maxxing’, ‘fertility-maxing’, ‘sleep-maxxing’ or (more worryingly) ‘looks-maxxing’, the suffix denotes the behaviour of optimising a specific aspect of life, ranging from superficial appearance to personal habits, for productivity. 

While extreme diet and exercise practices have been around for a long time, with the 90s and early 2000s being infamous for perpetuating a particularly restrictive eating culture, the 2026 iteration feels even more extreme. Now, it is not just wellness that can be optimised, but friendships, rest, education, work, play, and more, which place our entire lives under the scrutiny of expectation, and push everything to its limits. 

“Maxxing culture” has perhaps become most prominent in the news recently through the lens of the manosphere, with people like Clavicular acting as a sort of figurehead for the extreme efforts young men and boys are going to to ‘perfect’ their looks to attract women. According to the ideology, someone can “ascend” the PSL scale (a tiered rating system that grades physical attractiveness according to strict white supremacist ideals) by engaging with practices as simple as good skincare and posture (“softmaxxing”) to height surgery and bone smashing (“hardmaxxing”). 

While this is a very dark side of the wider trend, it signifies something deeper that Ian Bogost points out in his article for The Atlantic. In it, he mocks the absurdity of “maxxing’ culture, how “everything worth doing seems to be worth maxxing” now, from going offline to being healthy. But he also discusses how the trend’s tendency towards intensity, its inherent demand to do, be and apply in excess, reveals a dark truth: “The online life is an extremist one”. 

Interestingly, the idea of extremity was once a point of fascination for many. People who lived outside the mainstream and showed obsessive, unusual or even cult-ish behaviours were rare and intriguing (Louie Theroux would likely have made a documentary about you). But now it seems the extreme has become the mainstream. On TikTok and Reddit, ‘normal’ people are proclaiming to engage in these bizarrely intense rituals because, as Bogost points out, extremity itself has become a condition of these online spaces. 

Essentially, to be seen within the endless, fast-moving labyrinth of the internet, a degree of extremism is necessary. “Maxxing declares this state of affairs honestly,” he explains. “Finally, we can shed the pretence that internet life is reasonable, level-headed, or healthy. The whole internet is a machine for extremist thought, belief, and action.”

It is why we have seen such polarisation over the past few years, with Labour and the Conservatives replaced by parties that sit further at both ends of the spectrum. In a world where there is no longer a middle ground, no longer a grey area, “maxxing” culture feels like a natural evolution.

But extremity is not our natural condition. Evolutionarily, we are built to do the optimum amount of work to survive, without wasting time or energy. This is precisely what our instincts are for: to tell us when to sleep, what to eat, what decision to make, and when we are attracted to someone. 

But the facets of modern life have pushed us further and further away from these innate feelings. Of course, much of the time this is necessary for us to maintain normal, societal functioning (we can’t just come to work because our body needed more sleep). But at other times, it feels like we are pushing ourselves into directions that (while obtaining a certain desired result) feel unnatural to our body’s sense of intuition. 

Historically, humans were not designed to run long distances. Running was reserved for emergencies, such as if we needed to chase food or escape danger. Instead, gentle, low-impact exercise such as walking, swimming and climbing was better suited on a day-to-day basis. And yet now, people fight for a place in the London Marathon (and pay £80 to do it). 

While our instinct to eat and exercise in moderation is more obvious and relatively easy to tap into, certain instincts feel almost impossible to return to, so deeply detached we are from them. The level of self-consciousness we have accumulated in an era of social media has created a barrier between us and the version of ourselves we present to the world, ultimately preventing us from understanding what we really want deep down.

The instinct to dance, for example (a universal human behaviour rooted in our biology and social nature, often seen in children before they are taught, and present across all human cultures) has been deeply impacted by this. Concerned about what we might look like to others or whether we might be captured on film, people’s natural inclination to move and respond to music has been hindered. 

Elsewhere in dating, we have removed the essential gut feeling that comes from meeting someone in person, by transferring romance to the online world. Now, we judge how attracted we are to someone by superficial markers such as their looks, their lifestyle, and their highly artificial, overly thought-out answers to a few prompts. Of course, shared interests and physical beauty are important parts of compatibility, but when removed from the undefinable and instinctive quality that exists only in the flesh, they are futile. 

And, with sexual attraction distilled down to a swiping action, masculinity and femininity in a heterosexual context have become increasingly defined by narrower terms, and inevitably pushed men and women further away from each other. As journalist and writer Ash Sarkar explains in a recent interview for Novara Media, dating apps “cultivate a low self-worth and resentment of the opposite sex.” This is not instinctive; it is encouraged by online platforms.

In our previous research series, we saw how young people are attempting to reconnect with their instinct to play. The question is, what other parts of life will this seep into? Will we see a movement towards other instinctive behaviours such as intuitive eating, gentle exercise, taking breaks when needed, and generally listening to our bodies more intently? 

And what role do instincts play when it comes to consumption, taste and opinion? In a world where algorithms feed us information, references are recycled, and people are genuinely questioning whether it is possible to have an original thought, is it even possible to restore our true instinctive responses to culture? 

Whatever the answer, it feels like there is a genuine desire to try. While one side of the internet descends into this highly unnatural, optimisation culture, where everything we do is done in excess to achieve a set of results, will the other side react against this? Finding peace and success in moderation. And refining what the desired set of results we ultimately want.