Even if you’d never encountered it, the suffix “-maxxing” would probably be legible at first glance.
“Should You Be ‘Fibermaxxing’?” The Times asks. (No, a bodybuilder might answer, you should be proteinmaxxing.) People post pictures of Dave Brubeck albums and joke about jazzmaxxing their record collections. They beachmaxx on vacations and cozymaxx under voluminous blankets. Bears prepare for hibernation by salmonmaxxing. There’s a minor meme about a lifestyle of espresso and wine and impossibly long lunches — Europemaxxing.
Some of these bug me and some make me laugh. The difference is how aware each one seems of the places “-maxxing” comes from.
One place is video game culture, which may be starting to rival sports as a source of metaphors. People now look at the real world and notice speedruns and sidequests almost as often as they do layups or grand slams. Already, online, you can find people asking where the term “nerf” — to make a game element less powerful or dangerous — came from, presumably because they grew up playing with computers and not foam balls.
Gaming is where we get “min-maxing.” The language comes from 1940s academic game theory, but it has since been repurposed to describe a particular sort of strategy. Today’s min-maxer does not do balance. She invests every resource into making a single game tactic maximally effective, following the math and ruthlessly optimizing for pure mechanical advantage.
Then came incels. You know incels: They often seem to analyze human interaction as a sort of game and conclude that they’ve been unfairly marginalized by its mechanics — nerfed, basically, by the times. Maybe game strategy might help? This is how we got “looksmaxxing”: trying to raise your social or sexual “market value” by optimizing your attractiveness. It’s how we got the maxxing of just about any personal quality, as if spending points in a video-game skills tree: gymmaxxing, stylemaxxing, smellmaxxing. Years ago, a former incel posted on Reddit to argue that despite their origins, these strategies made sense; he personally had “looksmaxxed by optimizing my wardrobe, personalitymaxxed by cultivating determination, honesty, empathy and willpower” and “lowinhibmaxxed by acting more on impulse.” This might be “incel lingo,” he wrote, but “it isn’t completely off base to think that minmaxxing can work for a lot of people.”
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The post The Suffix That Tells Us to Ruthlessly Optimize Everything appeared first on New York Times.
