by Scott Samuelson
The first noble truth is that life is full of needless suffering. The second noble truth, only slightly less well-known, is that the cause of needless suffering is maxxing.
What’s the problem with maxxing? As I see it, it involves replacing our enjoyment of the goods in front of us with a twisted desire for more, more, more. We end up destroying the only goods that we’ll ever have.
For instance, a young man wants to hook up with a young woman, comes to think that he needs to be better looking, starts microdosing a GLP-1, and soon is smashing his cheekbones with a hammer. Or a university wants to educate young people, thinks that it needs to attract more students, shifts its focus to shiny dorms and bigtime sports, and soon is jettisoning all its educational standards and laying off faculty to finance its associate VPs of consumer satisfaction.
Even in the good old days of Siddhartha or Epicurus, the misplaced desire for more, more, more was regarded as the central problem of the time. Still, it’s unsettling just what a digitized science our age has made of gymmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, softmaxxing, hardmaxxing, moneymaxxing, statusmaxxing, careermaxxing—really, anythingmaxxing, even booksmaxxing and jazzmaxxing!
I’ll go out on a limb and characterize modernity itself as prosperitymaxxing and longevitymaxxing. The maxxing spirit has even infected modernity’s ethics. The central tenet of utilitarianism is that actions or rules are right insofar as they max the moral good and wrong insofar as they do the reverse. As far back as the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham was trying to figure out the precise equation for moralitymaxxing. Now radical altruists and longtermists leverage data to max their impact. We’ve gone from wanting to make the world a better place for our children to not having children so future generations can be in a better place. Read more »
