A friend told me yesterday that he is retardmaxxing.
I have to deal with the word first. It borrows language once used to demean people with intellectual disabilities and repackages it as a philosophy, which is its own small cruelty even when no harm is intended. My friend does not mean it cruelly. He picked it up the way people pick up all kinds of internet debris, because it was funny, because it floated past at the right moment, because it named a feeling. Still, the word is not free. I will use it because he used it, and because what sits underneath it is worth taking seriously.
Here is what he meant by it.
He spent his early years as an academic, the way I am living mine now. He read difficult things, argued about them, and believed, the way you must believe to do that work, that the arguments mattered. Then he left academia almost by accident and entered the corporate world. He found he was very good at it. The money was real. The ladder was real. The rewards arrived in the steady, legible way academic rewards almost never do. He climbed.
Then his father became severely ill, and something in him stopped long enough to look around.
What he saw was a hamster. A very accomplished hamster on a very expensive wheel, running. He had spent years optimizing his pace without ever asking where the wheel was taking him, because a wheel does not take you anywhere. His father’s illness did not expose his life as fraudulent. It simply interrupted the motion long enough for him to feel how dizzy he was, and to realize that the running itself had quietly become the entire content of his days.
So he decided to stop optimizing. Stop tracking. Stop consulting experts about every detail of his existence and waiting for permission before moving. He was going to “whoopsie” his way through life, as the gospel of retardmaxxing puts it, and figure things out as he went. He was choosing, deliberately, to become dumb about his own life, because the smart version had become the only version.
I understood him immediately, because something similar happened to me, and it happened early.
I had just graduated from law school. The future was beginning to harden into something definite, all forward motion and professional momentum. Then my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died four months later.
There was no long season of preparation. Just the diagnosis, then a rapidly narrowing window, then the rest of my life on the other side of it.
I remember the smallness of those four months more than the size of them. A chair pulled close to a bed. The long hours of sleep, the silence, the vigil I kept in his room. Near the end, when he could no longer move anything else in his body, he prayed by blinking his eyes. That was what was left to him, and he used it. A man reduced to almost nothing, still turning what remained toward God.
I still do not have language clean enough to describe what that did to me. It rearranged the hierarchy of things. I had been living sealed, optimizing toward a future no one had promised me, and I had mistaken the trajectory for the life. Meanwhile the actual substance of living, the people, the presence, the irretrievable ordinary days, had been sitting quietly in the background the whole time, waiting to be noticed.
So when my friend described the hamster wheel, I did not hear a stranger naming something new. I heard someone naming a thing I had carried for years.
The family these words come from
The word my friend used has cousins.
There is looksmaxxing, the project of pushing your face and body to their genetic ceiling and beyond: jaw exercises, supplements, surgeries, endless tiny calibrations built on the belief that if you could perfect your appearance, the rest of life would follow.
And there is a gentler, more respectable cousin Frank Bruni wrote about recently in the New York Times. He calls it brainmaxxing: a culture obsessed with cognitive optimization, where Americans spend billions of dollars chasing sharper memory, better focus, protection against decline. Supplements, puzzles, diets, “brain health” regimens. Bruni jokes that his morning Wordle counts as mental calisthenics rather than procrastination.
Then he arrives at the real insight. Cognitive health, he writes, has become the next frontier of self-care. Maybe the brain is the new belly, another part of the self to tone, refine, perfect.
That is the family resemblance. Looksmaxxing perfects the body. Brainmaxxing perfects the mind. Retardmaxxing claims to reject the entire game.
But it does not fully escape it. It preserves the exact structure of the thing it rebels against. It still imagines life as a problem solvable through the correct optimization strategy. Only now the thing being optimized is thoughtlessness itself. The wheel is still a wheel when you decide to run on it backward.
All of them share the same hidden grammar. They treat life as a quantity to maximize. More beauty. More cognition. More detachment. The variable changes. The structure does not.
So the real question was never which thing to max. The real question is whether maxxing is the right shape for a life at all.
Janan got off the train
I keep thinking about my friend Janan Delgado, who had almost the same realization and reached almost the opposite conclusion.
Janan once described herself as the fastest train on the track. As a student in Cairo, she quietly disdained anything slow. Her favorite animal was the bee because bees worked hard and got things done. She would enter the PhD program of her choice, teach somewhere prestigious, publish important books. Keep up or move aside.
The world she entered kept confirming that this was the only train worth riding. When she mentioned that her sister was visiting, an advisor frowned and asked how long, because the last time family visited, she had fallen behind on her writing. When she got engaged and wanted to spend a year in Cairo with her husband, a professor warned her she would fall through the cracks. No congratulations. Just concern about momentum.
Then she had children.
And the self she had built, the sealed self capable of shutting out every competing demand and arriving at work like a single-bodied person, cracked apart. Her dissertation, which should have taken a few years, took ten. She watched colleagues graduate and move on while she felt herself slowing into someone unrecognizable to her former self.
She finished anyway. Her dissertation passed with distinction and later won first place across all of Harvard.
But the lesson she took from that experience was not that she had succeeded despite the slowness. It was that interrupted, encumbered, relational work can still be excellent work.
Her essay ends with a literal train ride. She missed her stop and woke up sixty miles beyond her station. Sitting on a bench in Trenton, crying, she realized something strange: she had been riding the slow regional line. If she had been on the fast express she spent most of her life admiring, the same mistake would have carried her ninety-five miles in the wrong direction. Speed, she writes, is appealing. It is also unforgiving.
Janan did not abolish thinking. She did something harder. She allowed care to reorganize her life around other people and accepted what it cost her in speed.
I got on the train Janan got off
I have to be honest about where I stand in all this, because it would be easy to tell this story as though I am the calm observer watching friends sort themselves out.
I am not. I am doing the thing.
I have spent my life pursuing what people used to call the “life of the mind,” and I recently pivoted into academia, which means I boarded roughly the train Janan stepped off. I give up a great deal for the privilege of reading, teaching, writing, and thinking seriously about questions I believe matter. I love it the way you love something you waited a long time for.
And if I am honest, there is a version of what I do that is simply smartmaxxing in more dignified clothing. Publications. Talks. A number I could spend my entire life pushing upward while calling it a vocation.
The easy answer is that my work is meaningful while my friend’s was empty. But that answer flatters me too much to trust it.
The real difference, I think, is whether the work turns a person outward or seals them inward.
My friend’s climb had become a sealed room. So had Janan’s train for a time. So had my own life before my father’s illness cracked it open.
The danger was never intelligence or effort themselves. The danger is becoming the kind of person who can shut out every demand except his own ambitions, who can move through the world as though he owes nothing and belongs to no one.
What I want, on my better days, is not optimization but orientation. I want a life in which learning opens outward, into students, readers, friends, a husband, children, a God I am trying to serve. A life where thought deepens my obligations to other people rather than insulating me from them.
That, I think, is what my father’s illness taught me, and what my friend’s father taught him without meaning to. Not that thinking is bad. My friend remains one of the smartest people I know and will remain smart no matter how aggressively he tries to “whoopsie” his way through life. What broke was not the mind but the seal around it.
Retardmaxxing is his attempt to break that seal with a sledgehammer. I understand the impulse. Sometimes a seal that tight seems to demand one. But you do not have to become dumb to become present. You only have to let other people rearrange you.
None of these are really ways of maxxing at all. Not beauty. Not intelligence. Not even meaning.
The better question is quieter than that.
Who are you for?
Everything I have come to believe tells me the answer was never a number. It was a direction. Outward, toward each other, which is slower and more porous and less controllable than optimization. It is also, I suspect, the only thing any of this was ever for.