2026-09-21

Unclenching

what unclenching feels like for me

This is a good list - a reminder for me to watch out for such signals.

Meditation

Average moments of a long-term meditator

Another similar article that struck out to me because I guess that's the kind of headspace I am in.

I keep thinking I need to take an entire year off to build up the rhythms I feel I need for long term wellness and health benefits. Meditation would be one of the things to pursue in that time.

2026-09-22

Maxxing

Maxxing treats life as a problem when it’s a mystery | Psyche Ideas

Where might the scientification of the good life lead us? In recent years, this relatively innocuous application of science to life has curdled into something grotesque. We are now in an era of what Gen Z calls ‘maxxing’: internet slang for ruthlessly quantifying and optimising social or physiological traits in pursuit of better social standing or lifestyle. The most notable figure is Clavicular (real name Braden Eric Peters), the figurehead of ‘looksmaxxing’, a sub-genre of maxxing that urges people, usually young men, to optimise their physical proportions and facial structure to meet ideal standards. The purpose of looksmaxxing is to ‘mog’, or dominate other men by being more attractive. Common interventions include smashing the jawbone to achieve facial symmetry, self-prescribed methamphetamine to manage weight, and the injection of peptides for supposed skincare benefits.

In The Philosophy of Existentialism (1956), Marcel offers a critique of modernity. It begins with a simple observation: the modern world appears broken in the way a machine appears broken. Science affords us the ability to understand how something works, to set standards of ideal function, and therefore to know when things fall short. Brokenness becomes an essential feature of this world. For Marcel, this tendency to see the world as broken eventually turns inward. We come to see ourselves as nothing more than an ‘agglomeration of functions’ (physiological, social, even economic) that adhere to scientifically determined standards amenable to restoration, preservation or enhancement.

This changes the way we approach life. Whether it’s getting your 10,000 steps in a day, cultivating a healthy relationship with your family members, or meeting your KPI’s at work, life becomes governed by what Marcel calls a ‘vital schedule’ designed to repair, regulate, even optimise these functions. Hospitals, once understood as places of care, attentiveness and solidarity in the face of suffering, become repair shops. Workplaces, once sites of vocation, craft and communal purpose, become sites of efficiency. Even my daily naps are tweaks to my own vital schedule. Marcel’s warning is that total immersion in functionality excludes something: ‘this world is, on the one hand, riddled with problems and, on the other, determined to allow no room for mystery.’

Marcel’s key observation is this: ‘having’ is always a temporary excursion from ‘being’. As Marcel puts it in Being and Having (1949), ‘having tends, not to be destroyed, but to be sublimated and changed into being.’ Like dams that break the flow of water, the act of ‘having’ involves what Marcel calls ‘a kind of suppressed dynamic’. I can posit my body as an object for me, then work on it as if it were a broken machine, but I always have to return to my body as something to live in. The dam of ‘having’ my body as something to work on always breaks. This return to being is not incidental but structural: ‘being’ sustains ‘having’, the mystery of living will always encapsulate the solving of problems.

The scientification of the good life overlooks this. It promises a world of pure ‘having’, dictated entirely by diagnosing and solving problems. But the inevitable moments of return, in which the attitude of having and solving problems reverts to the mystery of being, puncture this fantasy. The life that we return to after tweaking it from afar still has to be lived, to be inhabited, and whatever this style of living is, it cannot be served by scientification. For Marcel, the maxxer’s tragedy is not that they are wrong about the value of optimisation, but that they have narrowed their existential horizon exclusively to problem-solving. Instead of trying to fix the mystery of being, maxxers should be finding ways to be at home in it.