When everyone is Maxxing

Clavicular is one of the most visible faces of looksmaxxing, an online movement that has drifted out of incel-adjacent forums into the broader teen internet, centered on the idea that appearance can be optimized through routines, supplements, surgery and, in the more extreme corners of the ecosystem, a hammer applied to the facial bones. Parents who have heard their teenage boys say someone got “mogged” or complain about being “sub-5” or “that’s so jester” are hearing the entry-level vocabulary of that world.

Maxxxing is everywhere now. In tech, it is tokenmaxxing, where engineers at Meta, OpenAI and Shopify compete on internal leaderboards to consume the most AI tokens per week, a race that Reid Hoffman publicly endorsed this month at Semafor’s World Economy summit and that Jensen Huang wants to formalize through quarter-million-dollar annual token budgets for top engineers. Meta took its internal leaderboard down April 8, a few days after The Information first reported on it. A TechCrunch headline on Friday summed up the backlash: Tokenmaxxing is making developers less productive than they think. One journalist called it hustle culture discovering AI and racing to perform productivity rather than achieve it.

With older adults, it is healthmaxxing, the polite Gen-Z name for what Bryan Johnson does when he spends $2 million a year on supplements, plasma infusions, hyperbaric oxygen and a leaderboard he calls the Rejuvenation Olympics. His company, Blueprint, raised $60 million in November from Silicon Valley investors and Hollywood celebrities, and this February he launched a program called Immortals that lets three people pay a million dollars each for access to his protocol. In 30 hours, 1,500 people applied. A Tebra survey of patients and providers this year found that more than a third of patients recognize the term supplement stacking, and more than half of providers have had to debunk a TikTok wellness claim during an appointment.

None of this is new for women. Women have been running through rotating beauty mandates for more than a century, being told to be thin and then curvy, natural and then glamorous, youthful but mature, sexy but not too sexual, polished but effortless. The target moves constantly, and the cultural obligation never seems to go away. What the current era adds is that boys and men are now being sold a version of the same system coded as competition rather than aspiration. Girls got snatched and glow-up and clean girl where boys got mogged and sub-5 and Chad. The female vocabulary sounds prettier because it traveled through princess culture, hip-hop and aspirational TikTok aesthetics, and the male vocabulary sounds harsher because it came up through forums where the incel worldview was a part of the foundational building blocks, however, the business model underneath is the same.

What Clavicular said on his return stream was one of the most “real” lines any of these subcultures have produced. He was telling his audience that the performance requires the chemistry. He uses a cocktail of stimulants because being watched, ranked and measured against the other men in the ecosystem is something his nervous system cannot absorb sober. The feed shows the jawline, the body fat percentage, the haircut, the confidence, though, the body is keeping its own ledger of what the performance has cost, and that ledger is the only real thing about all of it. 

As parents, I don’t think we need to know and speak the slang. But I do think it’s important for us to start looking for signals — not whether a child uses the word mogged, but whether a child believes that attractive people have easier lives and unattractive people are locked out, that personality matters less than symmetry, that the proper response to any insecurity is another optimization.

The questions that help in these moments are questions like where did you hear that, who gets excluded by that ranking, and who is profiting from making a person feel unfinished. What the leaderboards cannot measure is who a person actually is and what living a full and rich life is even for, and it’s only becoming more imperative that, as parents, we keep pulling our kids back to this.