everymaxxing

recently derek thompson¹ coined a word for what’s happening to american politics. he calls it vicemaxxing. the collapse of universal moral standards, the gas pedal of corruption pressed flat to the floor.

the word is exactly right. but the pattern isn’t political. it’s everywhere.

uber’s coo² recently admitted the company blew through its entire annual budget for claude code and cursor in 4 months. engineers using claude code went from 32% to 84% in a single quarter. 70% of code committed at uber is now ai-generated. when asked whether any of it had actually produced more useful features for users, his answer was: “that link is not there yet.” that’s tokenmaxxing.

a recent stanford and betterup labs³ study found 41% of knowledge workers receive ai-generated “workslop,” polished output that costs about 2 hours of rework per instance. slopmaxxing.

a university of pennsylvania study⁴ (hunt, marx, lipson, and young) had 143 students limit social media to 30 minutes a day for 3 weeks. the result was significant reductions in loneliness and depression. the mechanism the researchers named was social comparison. comparison is the killer of joy. the scroll is the comparison engine. scrollmaxxing.

vivek murthy’s surgeon general advisory⁵: about half of american adults are lonely. lacking social connection raises premature death risk to the level of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. isolationmaxxing.

recent gallup data⁶: 18% of u.s. adults are depressed. the rate has roughly doubled among under-30s in less than a decade, from 13% to 26.7%. anxiety and burnout affect half of working americans. wellbeing expectations five years out recently hit an all-time low. anxietymaxxing.

call the whole thing everymaxxing. same shape, every domain. gas pedal stuck. one number optimized. the substance eaten by the side effects.

there used to be a word for the response. temperance. it isn’t really in the discourse anymore. nobody clearly cares.

it’s worth saying plainly: biology is catching up.

the body and the brain weren’t built for any of this. not the political news cycle, not the perpetual scroll, not the 24/7 dopamine drip of ai delivering the feeling of productivity. they evolved under scarcity. we’ve handed them abundance and then asked them to keep performing. the chase is real, the cost is real, and the cost is being measured in the kind of slow statistics that look like fine print until you actually live in one of them. 18% depression. half of adults lonely. wellbeing expectations at all-time lows. a generation of under-30s where every fourth person is depressed.

the antidote isn’t deceleration. that’s just rebrand-grinding. it’s three practices, all maxxed in the other direction.

detachmaxxing. intentional time off the dashboard, off the scroll, off the metric. boredom isn’t a problem to solve. it’s the wake-up signal. sandi mann’s classic study⁷: participants given a boring task produced significantly more creative output on a follow-up than the control group. the brain, given nothing to consume, starts to produce.

experiencemaxxing. trade the screen for things with texture. walks. books. cooking. conversation that lasts longer than four sentences. kaplan’s attention restoration theory⁸ has held up for 40 years for the same reason newport’s deep work sells millions of copies. focus is rarer than effort, and only certain environments restore it.

lovemaxxing. the people in the room with you outscore the scroll on every metric that matters. health, longevity, happiness, judgment. murthy’s advisory measured the lift. strong social connection cuts the odds of premature death by roughly half. nothing on a phone is doing that for you.

we’ve been writing all summer about how the modern stack moves at a speed human biology was never built for. that’s still the throughline. the practical takeaway is just simpler than we wanted it to be.

we have to move back to manual. not all the way, not as a rejection, just often enough. close the laptop. sit with the boredom. take the walk. read the paper book. eat dinner with the people you love. talk longer than four sentences.

the future of work and life isn’t more maxxing. it’s choosing which to opt out of, and which to actually lean into.