I often wonder what Tyler Durden would say if, in a hypothetical Fight Club 2, he could see what we have been reduced to today.
The scene before his eyes would look more or less like this: a teenager takes a photo of himself. He posts it on social media with a tag. He waits. His phone buzzes. Little by little, he starts receiving dozens of anonymous comments from users analysing every millimetre of his face. Jawline to shave down. Canthal tilt to correct. Some rate him 6, others 6.3, others 5 and a half. He needs a glow up.
This is not an isolated incident or an episode of Black Mirror.
A scene like this did not come from Palahniuk’s pen. It is the daily routine of hundreds of thousands of young people aged 14 to 25 (and older, to be honest).
On TikTok alone, the hashtag #looksmaxxing exceeds 170,000 videos, with billions of views in total. The term is a blend of looks and maxxing: maximising one’s appearance to the limit of one’s genetic potential. Or beyond.
And so the body has become a project to optimise. The face is now a KPI. And a single principle governs it all: if you are not at your best, it is because you are not trying hard enough.
We have stopped blaming those above us. Perhaps because they have become unreachable?
No, the enemy is now ourselves. To be fought with every tool available.
Where it really comes from
Looksmaxxing has its roots in the manosphere forums and incel culture of the mid-2010s, in spaces dominated by the so-called black pill: the nihilistic belief that genetic physical attractiveness is the only real driver of social and romantic success. In those forums, faces were broken down with protractors and geometric lines, and participants were ranked on scales running from “subhuman” to “Chad”.
In recent years, that toxic language has been cleaned up and packaged for a much wider audience. The algorithms that reward self-improvement content did the rest: they took a niche ideology, born of frustration and resentment, and turned it into viral content for millions of teenagers now convinced that life is an experience to be maximised in every respect.
From aesthetics to our relationships with others.
From the particular to the general
Lookmaxing is not an exception, merely the expression of an underlying logic that has colonised every other area of contemporary life.
I am referring to the belief that everything (from sleep to relationships, from cortisol to mindfulness) is a parameter to be maximised, and that settling for any value, even a good one, is a failure.
You sleep, but you know exactly how much you slept because a ring on your finger tells you every morning with a score.
You work, but working well is not enough: you need to bill. And if you are not billing, you need to be networking.
Not networking? Fine, you still have to fill that time by “improving” yourself at something else while you wait for the next opportunity. Yoga. Meditation. Training pushed to the extreme.
Even when you relax you have to produce something: free time no longer serves to calm the mind, but to make you perform better for whatever comes next.
Looksmaxxing applies to the face the same equation that performance culture applies to everything else. If a parameter exists, it must be maximised.
If you don’t maximise it, it’s your fault.
What happens when we try to optimise everything
Clinical psychology calls this maladaptive perfectionism.
Those who suffer from it make their self-worth depend on meeting high standards, in an all-or-nothing logic: anything less than perfect is experienced as total failure. And what consequences could all this possibly have on young people who are still forming their view of themselves and of the world?
Beyond a certain threshold, this drive reduces performance. Much like carrying on training when you are exhausted, or when you have a tear: it does not build the muscle, it wears it down.
This is the point optimisation culture prefers not to look at: beyond a certain threshold, every further attempt to maximise a metric stops producing wellbeing and starts consuming it.
It is a structural property of any system, human or mechanical, pushed beyond its point of equilibrium.
What Tyler Durden would say today
Don’t make me say what Tyler Durden would say, because it would be very foul-mouthed.
We can, however, guess the gist of his speech, reminding ourselves that training, sleeping or taking care of our skin are not problems in themselves. The problem is when these things stop being choices and become obligations. When we find ourselves measuring ourselves against standards nobody can quite name.
The first thing to recover today, then, is the distinction between improvement and endless optimisation. Improvement has a direction and, sooner or later, reaches a point where you can stop and enjoy the results. Endless optimisation, by contrast, never has an end point, because every goal achieved becomes the starting point for the next one. And that is exhausting.
The second thing to do is to recognise that imperfection is not a flaw to be corrected, but a natural condition of being human.
We need to be imperfect. We need to be inefficient. It is fine to spend an afternoon lying down without having to make money and optimise everything. Accepting this is not resignation. It is the only way to stop living in a perpetual state of inadequacy measured against a parameter that, by definition, can never be fully satisfied.
What will remain if we do not change
Let us think about the legacy we want to leave tomorrow.
Are we really comfortable raising a generation on the myth of measurement? Shaping it, at such a delicate age, on the principle that if you are not first, you are last?
Teaching young people that they can be incomplete, on pause, even mediocre at something without it defining their worth is one of the few real defences against a digital environment built precisely to convince them otherwise.
The enemy in this story is not the technology that tracks sleep, nor the app that rates faces, nor the algorithm that rewards self-improvement. These are all tools, simply doing what they were built to do.
The real enemy does not live in an app or an algorithm. It lives in the mind of whoever decided that nothing is ever enough.
Yes, that enemy is us.
Us, and our modern obsession with comparison. Us, and this insecurity that never seems willing to leave us.
New Connections (FAQ)
In practice, how do you tell healthy improvement apart from harmful optimisation?
By looking at where the drive comes from and where it ends. Healthy improvement stems from a personal desire, has a defined goal and, once that goal is reached, leaves room for real satisfaction. Pathological optimisation stems from comparison with an external standard that always moves one step further ahead, and even when a goal is reached it brings no satisfaction, only the next goal to chase. One simple question helps you see which side you are on: if I reached this goal today, would I stop and enjoy it, or would I move straight on to the next metric to fix?
If social media and algorithms fuel this pressure, does it make sense to drastically cut the time young people spend online?
It reduces exposure, but it does not solve the underlying mechanism unless it comes with something else. A teenager who spends less time on TikTok but keeps measuring their worth against performance standards, such as grades, sporting results and physical appearance, will simply shift the same logic onto different ground. Cutting time online is useful as an immediate containment measure, but real protection means teaching, from an early age, that one’s worth does not depend on any score, in any area. Without that foundation, any future algorithm will still find a way in.
Is there a way to practise self-care, personal growth or discipline at work without falling into the trap of endless optimisation?
Yes, and the difference lies in setting explicit limits before you start, not along the way. Deciding in advance what is “enough” for a specific goal, a training routine, a professional milestone, a level of care for one’s appearance, and genuinely stopping when that level is reached, is the only way to enjoy the benefits of discipline without being consumed by it. The problem is never discipline itself. It is the absence of a finishing line declared from the outset.