You can't max a life

Somehow maxxing and giving up are the same mistake.

There’s a word for it now. Maxxing.

Looksmaxxing. Sleepmaxxing. Gymmaxxing. Moneymaxxing. You take one part of yourself and push it to the ceiling. Faster, better, higher than the person next to you. The word crawled out of some grim corners of the internet, then went everywhere, half a joke and half not. Now people say it with a straight face.

I feel the pull too. Open any feed and you see a hundred people at the top of a hundred stats at once. Someone sleeps better than you. Someone lifts more. Someone made more money before lunch than you’ll make this year. It’s hard not to read that as a scoreboard. It’s harder not to want to climb it.

There’s a version of this essay where I tell you to slow down, and it would be me giving up and dressing it up nicely. “Don’t max” comes easy when you’re tired of climbing. One might misconstrue exhaustion as wisdom.

But I don’t think that’s what this is. So stay with me.

Maxxing and giving up are the same move

Think about the two things people say when the world feels like a race.

One side says you have to win it so grind harder and optimize everything. Fall behind and you’re done.

The other side says the race is rigged, the machine always wins, so why bother. You can’t fight it.

These sound like opposites, but they’re not. Both of them believe there’s a race. While one sprints, the other sits down or lies flat, so to speak. Neither one stops to ask if the race is real.

That’s the trick: you can’t be behind in a game you’re not playing. So the way out isn’t to run faster or to quit. It’s to even notice that nobody started a clock.

You can max a stat. You can’t max a life.

Here’s why maxxing feels so natural and works so badly.

In a game, someone hands you the stat. Strength, gold, level, whatever. The game, sometimes implicitly and other times explicitly, hands you the ceiling too. You know what the top looks like, and you know when you’ve hit it. Maxxing makes sense there as there’s a number, and the number goes up.

Nobody handed you the stat for your life. You picked it up from the feed without noticing, and all the things that make a life full don’t have a number.

There’s no high score for love, you don’t max a friendship, and certainly a good marriage isn’t a stat you top out, and a twenty year friendship isn’t something you finish. You go deeper into these things. You don’t beat them.

You can’t max a walk with your kid. You can’t max a quiet morning. You can’t max a practice, whether it’s meditation or a hike, because the whole point is there’s no summit, just the parts in the moment. The small things in life turn out to be the important bits.

Maxxing takes the logic of a video game and drops it on a life. Then it wonders why the win feels empty. You climbed to the top of a stat that was never the point.

Even the winners will tell you this

Maybe you don’t care about a fuller life. Maybe you read all that and thought, fine, but I still want to win.

Okay. The strange thing is that maxxing loses even on those terms.

I’ve been reading Jim Murphy’s Inner Excellence. He coaches world champions and has spent years studying how the best people alive stay calm when everything is on the line. You’d expect a book like that to be all grind, but it isn’t.

One of his clients became a world champion the year he stopped trying to beat his biggest rival. He realized the rival was the reason he got to play the sport he loved, so he went from wanting to crush the guy to wishing him well. Then he won. Funny how things work.

Murphy tells another story about a swimmer named Lewis Pugh, who set out to swim a kilometer in water near the North Pole. Mind you, the water near the North Pole kills most people in under a minute and Pugh failed in practice. He only made it when he stopped swimming for himself and swam to wake people up about the oceans.

The pattern shows up over and over where the people who perform best aren’t the ones gripping hardest. They’re the ones who let go of the scoreboard and gave their attention to the thing in front of them. It seems presence beats optimization. So even if all you want is to be great, the grind is a worse road there than being fully here. Enjoy the journey and you might even get to the end.

That’s the part I’d push on if a striver were sitting across from me. You’re not losing the race because you’re too soft. You’re losing it because you’re staring at the scoreboard instead of the ball.

What a fuller life looks like

Drop the frame and something simple is left.

Not more. Enough.

Not score and certainly not maxxing it. Depth.

You aim at the parts you control such as your effort, your attention, and how you treat people. You let go of the parts you don’t, like whether you came out on top. You can always give your best effort. You can’t always win, and chasing the win wrecks the effort.

You give more than you take. Spend a day trying to be useful to someone instead of trying to get ahead of them, and the fear quiets down since most of the fear was about you anyway. Take yourself out of the center and there’s less to protect.

You go deep instead of wide. One craft you keep returning to and a few people you keep showing up for. A body you keep healthy, not to win, to live in. None of it maxes but all of it grows.

Your turn

Here’s where I land.

There’s nothing to max because I was never a number, you were never a number, and we are not numbers. You’re the thing the numbers were trying to point at, and we mistook that pointing as a directive.

But you need to be aware that the machine is real and the pressure to climb is real, and I won’t pretend opting out is free, or that it’s an option when the rent is due. Enough comes easier when you’re safe and I know that.

But between the person sprinting up the leaderboard and the person who gave up on it, there’s a third person. She’s not running and she’s not sitting down. She’s building something that doesn’t have a top. From the outside she looks like she’s losing the race.

It turns out that she’s not in it.

Be her. Be you.