everymaxxing

in may 2026 derek thompson¹ coined a word for what is 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 fits politics. the pattern travels.

uber's coo² said in may 2026 that 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 produced more useful features for users, his answer was: "that link is not there yet." tokenmaxxing.

a 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. loneliness and depression fell. the mechanism the researchers named was social comparison: the scroll turns other people's lives into a ranking. 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.

gallup data from 2023⁶: 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 5 years out hit an all-time low in that same reporting. anxietymaxxing.

call the whole thing everymaxxing. one number gets optimized in each domain, the gas pedal stays down, and the side effects eat the substance the number was supposed to serve.

temperance used to name the response. it barely shows up in the discourse now, and the incentives around dashboards do not reward it.

biology is catching up. the body and the brain were built under scarcity. we handed them a political news cycle, a perpetual scroll, and a 24/7 drip of ai that delivers the feeling of productivity, then asked them to keep performing. the cost shows up in slow statistics that look like fine print until you live inside 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.

slowing down as a brand is still grinding. three practices push in the other direction.

detachmaxxing. intentional time off the dashboard, off the scroll, off the metric. boredom is a wake-up signal, not a problem to solve. sandi mann's study⁷ found participants given a boring task produced 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 keeps selling: focus is rarer than effort, and only certain environments restore it.

lovemaxxing. the people in the room with you outscore the scroll on health, longevity, happiness, and 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 have been writing all summer about how the modern stack moves at a speed human biology was never built for. that throughline still holds. the practical takeaway is simpler than we wanted it to be.

move back to manual often enough to feel it. 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.

work and life get better when you choose which maxxing to refuse, and which to lean into on purpose.