A Taxonomy Of Maxxing

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LooksMaxxing: Improving your beauty as much as humanly possible with diet, exercise, fashion, and jaw surgery, so that everyone is in awe of your physical perfection and ready to take your advice.

LunchMaxxing: Treating lunch as the most sacred meal and eating it for up to six hours daily, impressing even the Southwestern Europeans.

PlantMaxxing: Turning your home into a huge, beautiful jungle because you are a Jumanji franchise super-fan.

FaxMaxxing: Declaring smartphone independence by trashing your iPhone and communicating only with fax machines for a whole year.

TJMaxxing: Shopping with with your mom for impressive bargains on brand-name pants, frosted mugs, and decorative baskets — until you pass out from how good the deals are.

SadMaxxing: Reading tons of nihilistic philosophy and Edgar Allen Poe, while crying all day inside a dark potato sack.

SorryMaxxing: Apologizing profusely to everyone for everything: for walking too close to people, needing bathroom breaks, the fact that it’s raining, having a car that was in the way when they rear-ended you, and for apologizing too much.

SipMaxxing: Drinking every drink as slowly as possible, with increasingly tiny sips.

DipMaxxing: Dipping a handheld snack — e.g. a cucumber slice or pita chip — into as many party dips as possible, way beyond the point where it’s weird and gross.

MetricMaxxing: Tracking every quantity in your life with a custom analytics dashboard: protein grams, sleep minutes, steps taken, time spent reclined, unrequited fist bumps, number of anguished screams, and “how goth I felt today, on a scale of 1 to raven.”

CornMaxxing: Honoring American corn farmers by eating a 100% pure corn diet, from corn on the cob, to corn smoothies, to corn tortillas with with fresh corn salsa.

WaxMaxxing: Collecting an absurd amount of scented candles, obscure vinyls, and challenging dialogues about existentialism.

TheseusMaxxing: Replacing everything in your life one piece at a time — including wardrobe, furniture, books, friendships, and political opinions — until you are a radically different person. Repeat every six months.

JazzMaxxing: Wearing newsboy caps, studying Coltrane and Mingus daily, and snapping all the time in an odd meter.

RanchMaxxing: Putting ranch on pizza, salads, fries, tacos, steak, popcorn, lasagna, pho, sushi, and ice cream, and launching a startup that develops ranch-based fuels for cars, trucks, and airplanes in order to grow our #RanchBasedEconomy.

YoloMaxxing: Trying as many hobbies, jobs, trips, festivals, flings, retreats, workshops, and polyamorous triads as possible to make sure that life isn’t wasted on anything too stable or lucrative.

NoirMaxxing: Speaking solely in cynical, dramatic one-liners about betrayal, murder, and those who double-crossed you. And wearing a fedora.

PascalWagerMaxxing: Observing as many religions as possible — but only the ones that believe in heaven and hell — to maximize your salvation chances.

MaxMaxxing: Maxing the number of things you are Maxxing so that your life is unmitigated chaos and you can write a quirky memoir about it.

“Max”Maxxing: Maximizing the number of guys named ‘Max’ at your next party so that you can say “Hello Max, meet my friend Max” which is something you crave deeply.

MinMaxxing: Minimizing the number of things you are maxxing so that you can maximize your free time and keep the number of crazy distractions in your life to a maximally-satisfying minimum.

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*Alex Baia contributes to The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other publications.*