Ian Bogost opens his Atlantic essay on the vocabulary of the past few years — looks-maxxing, sleep-maxxing, protein-maxxing, potassium-maxxing, sun-maxxing, testosterone-maxxing — and lands on a description that does most of the work in the piece: maxxing is “a reductionist worldview cloaked in expansionist language.”
The suffix sounds like abundance. The practice is narrowing. To maxx something is to pick one measurable output, subordinate everything else to it, and accept the sacrifice that follows. Bogost’s argument is that this is not a TikTok curiosity but the local dialect of a much older culture of efficiency, one that has been leaking out of workplaces and into personal life for two centuries, and that its cost is the capacity to be present in your own day.
How efficiency got into everything
Bogost traces the lineage to industrialism, when efficiency became a core ideal of working life. When offices displaced factories as the emblem of work, the measurement got more abstract: not just profit maximized, but meetings shortened, messages answered, bottlenecks cleared. Workers learned to manage themselves preemptively — their own calendars, their own lunch breaks — in line with the mandate.
From there the mindset spread past work entirely. He lists the ordinary examples: grocery shopping replaced by delivery apps, vacations optimized for credit-card points and lounge access, reading converted into Kindle streaks and Goodreads goals, exercise into VO₂ and HRV numbers, eating into macronutrient acquisition. “Every pleasure can become instrumental—with every instrument focused on the outcomes it might produce.”
The sentence that states the problem plainly: “Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now.” Goals crowd out experience, and the thing being optimized is your life, which is not a project that can be completed and then enjoyed. Bogost’s summary is that “we used to optimize work so we could do everything else. Now we optimize life as though living were another job.”
The present as waiting room
Bogost is candid that this is partly self-description. He names the developments that made wonder feel scarce to him: frictionless services for chores, the decline of serendipity in a world where every trip is mapped in advance, remote work that removes the accidents and textures of a routine, AirPods that let you opt out of ambient noise and impromptu conversation, phones that fill every gap in the day. His sharpest formulation is that contemporary life “has depleted the value of the moment,” teaching us to treat the present as “a waiting room in which to plan for—and, yes, optimize—the future.”
His own remedy is unglamorous, which is the point. He describes treating supposedly unimportant sensations as vital ones — the plush of slippers in the morning, the warmth of a mug in his hands, gravel underfoot on a walk. None of it interfered with any plan. All of it required was construing what he was already doing as valuable.
That leads to the ordinary objects he has spent years writing about: toasters, gas-station signs, backpacks, slushies, gearshifts. These are not escapes from efficiency; they are evidence that usefulness and beauty and even a kind of genius are embedded in things we treat as mere equipment. His example is the A BIT MORE button on a modern toaster — so obvious that you stop seeing it, and transformative if you want your toast to come out right.
Wonder, and what it asks for
The claim is that wonder is “the most immense of our sensations” and the designated antidote. For adults, he says, it gets compartmentalized — filed under extraordinary and rare, banished outside daily routine. But when he spent a year asking people what inspires everyday wonder, the mundane answers came as often as the grand ones: the familiar awe of an airplane breaking through cloud, but also a procession of ants, an old refrigerator, a sewing machine whose hums and clicks had become a friend’s familiar voice, pots and pans carrying decades of family meals, even a toilet admired after a repair revealed how elegantly it worked.
“Whenever you cease treating the world as scenery or equipment,” he writes, “you’ll find that you encounter the world as something inexhaustibly, constantly present.” And he is careful about the payoff: “Wonder may not improve your résumé, make you hotter, or maximize your income. It will simply remind you that you are a body alive in the world, right now, and that is a better place to begin than most self-help advice would have you believe.”
Where the argument stops
This is an essay, not a program, and it does not pretend otherwise. There is no evidence here beyond the author’s own history and a set of conversations, and no engagement with the considerable research on attention, mind-wandering, or awe — Bogost’s authority is that he has been thinking about ordinary objects for years and has noticed what his own habits cost him. Readers who want a protocol will not find one; the proposal is closer to a permission slip than a practice.
The more interesting tension is left unresolved. Bogost is writing in a magazine that also publishes optimization advice, about slippers purchased through the same frictionless delivery culture he diagnoses, and he knows the maximizers and the cynics will roll their eyes at the scenic route he recommends. His answer is that the route requires no detour: “It simply asks you to accept gifts that the universe is already handing you.” Whether an essay can talk someone out of a habit that every device they own reinforces is a question the piece raises and declines to answer.