Frictionmaxxing

Jane frictionmaxxing by cycling 25km to the airport at 6am on a 20 inch wheel folding bike

If you haven’t heard of the maxxing trends, you could be as behind the times as me. Maxxing means maximising some human feature or feat to its maximum potential. It’s often allied with freeing yourself from technology. Maxxing has been a huge thing on social media in 2026 (use of the term doubling January-May). The number of types of maxxing have simultaneously multiplied. Here are a few maxxing options:

LooksMaxxing – where maxxing began with the manosphere influencers who encourage extreme efforts to achieve an ‘ideal’ male look. This often means restrictive diets and exercise regimes to make men look more masculine. It has an extreme, dark, side where men physically injure themselves e.g. use hammers to shatter and reshape their jawlines. A less extreme way men try to change their jawlines is ‘mewing’, inventing by dentist John Mew who told men to press their tongue to the roof of their mouth to strengthen their jaw. Unfortunately, mewing doesn’t work.
StudyMaxxing – students reorganising their schedules or using specific note-taking systems to increase study efficiency and raise their grades.
SleepMaxxing – people trying to improve their sleep length and quality with regimented bedtime routines, wearable sleep trackers, and installing blackout curtains or white noise machines.
HobbyMaxxing – increasing time spent on leisure activities rather than mindless scrolling.
ChinaMaxxing – adopting lifestyle optimisation practices associated with contemporary Chinese culture. ChinaMaxxing is usually framed as a way to improve self-discipline, productivity and quality of life by eating traditional foods, adopting Chinese health methods, and minimalist design styles.
FiberMaxxing – increasing dietary fibre intake to improve digestion, support gut health and reduce disease risk.
D**kMaxxing – (yes really) demonstrated by the looksmaxxer Clavicular (born Braden Eric Peters) with a bunch of grocery bags held on his wrist. Clavicular says,”You are basically holding onto your suspensory ligament and stretching”.

Despite being behind the times in my awareness of social trends, I’m a long-term personal advocate for frictionmaxxing – intentionally choosing less convenient options in daily life to build tolerance to discomfort, practice focusing, and continue to learn. Too bad I didn’t think about creating an internet meme a decade ago – I could have been a TikTok sensation.

I wrote about my frictionmaxxing practices before in Doing Hard Things. As a child I chose to ride my bicycle to school rather than catch the bus. I also had a phase in which I ate only with chopsticks rather than a knife and fork. I thought it made no sense that people drove to work, rather than walking or cycling, then drove to a gym after work (I still think it makes no sense).

I have continued lifelong with my frictionmaxxing. I would rather make my own furniture than buy it from a store. I catch the bus when I travel rather than get a taxi…that dates me…rather than get an Uber. The only baked treats I eat are home made. I recently asked a designer to make a cover for the album I will release later in the year (titled Menagerie) and made myself learn a new drawing programme on the computer so I could provide the designer with a meaningful draft. In fact, I spent quite a lot of 2025 learning music software so I could work on my album rather than handing it all off to someone else. And I prefer holidays that require significant effort. I like a holiday that reminds me how good we have it in the western world much of the time; we don’t need more ease, we need to get better at dealing with adversity.

However, frictionmaxxing, just like any other maxxing and indeed most things in life, is good to do but not good to do too much of. Fibremaxxing can to bloating and constipation which are the symptoms people eat fibre not to experience. Similarly, when maxxing becomes something you do because of social media, this would seem to be the inverse of what maxxing is supposed to deliver – an optimised you, freed from the grasp of technology. This is the point where I wonder whether the maxxing trends may actually be more of the same…selling ‘self-help’ approaches and products through the medium of social media which hooks people into even more social media than before. We are sold the line perfection is in our grasp, if only we try hard enough. And that more is better, which it clearly isn’t whether we are talking eating more fibre, sleeping more, or breaking our jaws.

Whoever said, “Be moderate in all things, including moderation” (attributed variously to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Socrates, Horace Porter, Gaius Petronius Arbiter, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin with no evidence any of them said this) had it in one.