On Looksmaxxing, the Mirror We Didn’t Build, and the Freedom That Optimization Can Never Buy
It’s hard to be beautiful when you’re so ugly.
I don’t mean physically. I mean the way most of us walk through our own lives, squinting at ourselves through a funhouse mirror we didn’t build and can’t seem to put down. The mirror that was handed to us by a parent, a peer group, a culture, a trauma, a theology badly applied. The mirror that tells us, in the specific frequency only shame can transmit, that what we are is not quite enough. That what we are requires adjustment. That the distance between who we are and who we’re supposed to be is a problem requiring a solution.
Most people never question the mirror. They just keep adjusting their posture in front of it.
The looksmaxxing movement has simply made this universal wound visible. And loud. And, somehow, a runway show.
A recent piece in The New Yorker opens with a concept that stopped me mid-sentence. The writer invokes the French term jolie laide, which translates literally as pretty-ugly, to describe a person who ought by rights to be unappealing but somehow isn’t. Someone whose features are strange, unexpected, asymmetrical in ways that violate the conventional rules of beauty and are all the more compelling for it. The canonical examples offered are Charlotte Gainsbourg and Barbra Streisand, of whom her “Funny Girl” co-star Omar Sharif once said: “The first impression is that she’s not very pretty. But after three days, I am honest, I found her physically beautiful, and I start lusting after this woman.”
The writer then names the inverse phenomenon. If some people are beautiful because they are fascinatingly ugly, then there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful. People who have achieved, as the piece puts it, “technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma.” And no one, the writer argues, is “more laide jolie, more sculpted and faultless, more wooden and sexless” than the figure at the center of this cultural moment: a 20-year-old from New Jersey who goes by the online name Clavicular.
I read that sentence twice. Then I set the article down for a moment and thought about every person I have ever worked with who had spent years building an impeccable version of themselves, technically excellent, externally flawless, and somehow completely unable to feel alive inside their own life.
The writer was describing a TikTok influencer. I was thinking about a much larger population.
The Movement: What It Is and Where It Came From
If you have not encountered the term looksmaxxing yet, you will. It has broken into mainstream cultural conversation with a velocity that suggests it touched something that was already live and waiting to be named. The New Yorker piece, articles in The Atlantic, The New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, and dozens of academic publications have all arrived within months of each other, orbiting the same phenomenon from different angles.
The concept itself is straightforward. “Maxxing” comes from online subculture shorthand for maximizing, usually to an extreme or obsessive degree. To looksmaxx is to pursue the maximum possible physical attractiveness through any available means, and the word “any” is doing significant work in that sentence. The methods in current circulation range from the mundane (better grooming, more sleep, improved diet) to the medically reckless (illegal testosterone, human growth hormone, gray-market peptides, fat-dissolving acid injections) to what the New Yorker piece calls “downright demented,” including “bone-smashing,” which is exactly what it sounds like: advocates of this technique literally strike their own faces with hammers in the hope that the resulting bone trauma will reshape their jawlines. The logic, such as it is, parallels the way orthodontia uses sustained pressure to shift bone structure over time. The execution is considerably less supervised.
The figure currently synonymous with the movement is Braden Peters, who goes by Clavicular online. The name is derived from the clavicle bone, because clavicle width is treated as a meaningful aesthetic metric in the world he inhabits. He is twenty years old. He began injecting himself with testosterone at fourteen. His arms, as the New Yorker describes them, “bulge out of the tight sleeves of his polo shirts” and his face is “oddly inflexible, even when he is speaking emphatically or attempting to make an expression.” The writer observes, with a precision that is both clinical and devastating, that watching him “I could not shake the feeling that he has a smooth mound where his genitals are supposed to be, as if he were a giant Ken doll.” Clavicular has, in fact, acknowledged that his testosterone regimen has likely rendered him infertile, a price he describes as acceptable.
He microdoses methamphetamine to stay lean, at least according to his own claims. He has injected a then-17-year-old girlfriend with Aqualyx, a fat-dissolving acid, to reshape her jaw. He is planning a rhinoplasty, a double-chin surgery, and has expressed interest in a limb-lengthening procedure that would add four inches to a height that is already six feet two. He earns, reportedly, more than a hundred thousand dollars a month from livestreaming. He was expelled from college within weeks of arriving for storing testosterone in his dorm room. He has spoken approvingly, on podcast appearances, of the idea that beauty is “a huge numbers thing, almost like the Fibonacci sequence” and insists that when you understand the objective measurements, attraction becomes mathematics. “You’re able to be a lot more analytical with rating people,” he explained.
His interviewer, podcaster Adam Friedland, asked the question that the New Yorker piece identifies as the most clarifying one in the entire conversation: “What’s sexy about math?”
Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing. That is precisely the problem.
To understand what looksmaxxing is and why it exists, you have to understand where it came from, because it did not arrive from nowhere. It is the most recent and most visible product of an ideological lineage that has been developing in the margins of internet culture since the early 2010s.
The New Yorker piece traces this lineage with useful precision. The movement’s roots are in the incel subculture, a word that began as a neutral term (short for “involuntarily celibate,” coined by a Canadian woman in 1997 as a label for a support community for people struggling with loneliness and social isolation) and was subsequently colonized by a subculture of men who constructed an elaborate ideology around their romantic failures.
The core of that ideology is this: heterosexual women are “hypergamous,” meaning hardwired by evolution to pursue mates of higher genetic and social status. Men of average or below-average attractiveness are therefore structurally disadvantaged in romantic competition, not because of their personalities or behaviors or choices, but because of their genetics. The hierarchy is biological and therefore essentially fixed. The conclusion incels drew from these premises was that men outside the top tiers of physical attractiveness have no rational grounds for hope. The term for accepting this conclusion and abandoning romantic aspiration entirely is “taking the black pill,” a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, where a pill of the same color represented permanent disconnection from an agreeable illusion.
Looksmaxxers agree with the incel diagnosis. They reject the incel conclusion. Where the blackpill says the hierarchy is fixed and resistance is futile, looksmaxxing says the hierarchy is real but can be climbed. You are not trapped by your genetics. You are trapped by your current genetics, your current face, your current body. All of that is raw material. All of that can be optimized.
The movement has its own taxonomy, its own vocabulary, and what the New Yorker calls “pseudoscientific jargon” deployed with the confidence of genuine expertise. The PSL scale, named after three early incel forums (PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism), is the community’s master metric. It runs from one to eight and divides humanity into three tiers: subhuman, normie (subdivided into low-tier normie, mid-tier normie, and high-tier normie), and Chad (subdivided into Chadlite, Chad, and Giga Chad). At the very apex of the scale are the “True Adams,” described in community guides as figures so physically perfect that they belong more to mythology than to human experience: “this designation is reserved for mythical figures like Adonis or Apollo, as well as religious icons such as angels or prophets.”
The writer notes, with the kind of dry precision that marks the whole piece, the irony embedded in the movement’s language: “The scientific pretensions of the looksmaxxing community are belied by its reverent term for those who have succeeded in scrambling even a small way up the scale: a man who becomes beautiful is said to have ‘ascended,’ as if he had been spirited up into the skies.” The community built a pseudoscientific framework on top of a fundamentally religious impulse. The numbers are cover. Underneath them is a theology of salvation through physical perfection.
Why We Can’t Look Away
The New Yorker piece asks the most honest question available about this phenomenon: if the movement is as morally repugnant as it clearly is (and it is: a framework that designates human beings as “subhuman” based on facial geometry is not a framework that requires subtle ethical analysis), why are so many people so compelled by it? Why has Clavicular become, as the piece observes, “unavoidable, shooting to the top of news feeds and dominating algorithms”?
The answer offered draws on Susan Sontag, specifically her 1963 essay on the French mystic Simone Weil. Sontag wrote:
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self: these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
The New Yorker writer applies this to Clavicular with precision: in a culture too complex and too contradictory to accommodate straightforward sanity, there is something that compels attention about a person whose distortions are forthright. He is not pretending to be balanced. He is not performing reasonableness. He is telling you, openly, that he is willing to smash his own face with a hammer in pursuit of a mathematically perfect jawline, and somehow that transparency about an absurd project reads as more honest than the curated wellness performances that dominate the same cultural space.
I think Sontag’s diagnosis is right and the New Yorker’s application of it is right, and I want to add one layer that the piece gestures at but does not quite name: Clavicular captivates not just because he is forthright about his distortions, but because he is forthright about the distortions we share. The belief that worth is external, visible, and measurable. The belief that the gap between who you are and who you could be is a deficiency rather than simply a human condition. The belief that enough optimization, enough discipline, enough sacrifice will eventually produce the version of yourself that is finally acceptable. These are not fringe beliefs. They are load-bearing walls of the modern self. Clavicular just built his entire house out of them and invited cameras in.
He is telling you, openly, that he will smash his own face with a hammer for a perfect jawline. Somehow that reads as more honest than curated wellness.
The writer also engages the movement’s more sophisticated internal critique: that looksmaxxers are, for all their repugnance, engaged in a kind of de-fetishization. Karl Marx coined the concept of commodity fetishism to describe the way products become so familiar that they appear to have always existed, as if no one made them, as if they arrived ready to consume. Applied to beauty, the New Yorker writer observes: “When we see models beaming down at us from advertisements, their beauty can look like a fait accompli rather than a complex attainment. In one fell shot, a lacquered photograph erases the plastic surgeries, the dermatology appointments, the gruelling workouts, the perilous diets, the makeovers, the haircuts, the lotions and serums.” Looksmaxxers, whatever else they are, are at least stripping that illusion bare. They are showing their work. They are insisting that beauty is labor, not birthright.
This is true, and it is genuinely interesting, and it does not redeem the movement’s ideology. But it is worth noting because it points to something real: the culture that produces looksmaxxing is not simply the community of young men on looksmax.org. It is the entire apparatus of beauty commodification that has been running, largely unquestioned, for the entire lives of everyone currently consuming the content. The extremity is new. The underlying premise is not.
You Don’t Have to Be in the Community to Be Infected by It
Here is where I want to pause and say something that the cultural conversation around looksmaxxing tends to miss, because the conversation is largely organized around the most visible extremes: the bone-smashing, the testosterone, the PSL scale, Clavicular and his hammer.
The extremes matter. They are genuinely alarming and deserve the attention they are getting. But the extremes are not where the damage is primarily being done.
The damage is being done in the middle. In the ordinary, non-looksmaxxing population. In the vast majority of people who have never heard the term but who are nonetheless, quietly and without fanfare, absorbing the premises.
Consider what the algorithmic ecosystem of social media actually does. It does not require that you follow a looksmaxxing account to be influenced by a looksmaxxing-adjacent worldview. It requires only that you participate in a visual economy where certain faces receive more attention, more engagement, more apparent confirmation of worth than others. And over time, across millions of small data points, the brain does what brains do: it draws conclusions. It builds a map. And the map starts to look uncomfortably like the PSL scale, minus the explicit terminology.
Research on body image has consistently found that exposure to idealized physical standards, even passive, incidental exposure, produces measurable changes in how people evaluate their own bodies and faces. We have understood this in the context of women and magazine culture since at least the 1990s. What is newer, and what looksmaxxing signals loudly, is that men are now navigating the same landscape with equal or greater intensity, and with far fewer cultural tools to process it.
Eating disorders in men have been rising for years, underreported and underdiagnosed because the cultural script for eating disorders was written for a female subject. Body dysmorphic disorder, a condition in which a person becomes preoccupied with perceived flaws in their appearance to a degree that significantly impairs functioning, has seen sharp increases in presentation rates among young men. Cosmetic surgery rates for men have climbed substantially each year for more than a decade. These trends did not begin with looksmaxxing. But looksmaxxing has handed them a coherent ideology and a community, which is what a diffuse anxiety becomes when it finds a language.
The more insidious phenomenon, and the one I see most frequently in the people I work with, is subtler than any of these clinical categories. It is simply the quiet, persistent belief, rarely examined and almost never named, that the self as it currently exists is a work in progress in the wrong direction. That the appropriate response to being a human being is aggressive management. That the face you have, the body you have, the person you are at a cellular level of identity, is raw material requiring refinement before it is fit for presentation.
Most people carrying this belief are not bone-smashing. They are just living slightly outside themselves, maintaining a careful distance between who they are and who they allow anyone to see, performing a slightly more acceptable version of themselves in every room they enter, and expending a quiet but steady energy on the maintenance of that performance. The looksmaxxer has simply externalized and literalized what a very large number of people are doing internally.
You don’t have to follow a looksmaxxing account to be infected by the premise. You just have to live in the same visual economy.
The New Yorker piece arrives at this proximity from the aesthetic end. The writer’s argument, in its final movement, is that looksmaxxers are wrong not because they want to be beautiful but because they are wrong about what beauty actually is. The problem, as the piece frames it, is that Clavicular has mistaken a science for an art. He is searching for what the writer calls “an invariant formula for beauty, a rule as reliable as the algebraic injunction to perform the same operations to both sides of an equation, but there is no such thing.”
The proof of this is the very concept the piece opens with. Jolie laide, pretty-ugly, is not computable. It cannot be scored on the PSL scale. It is, by definition, the phenomenon that emerges when the formula breaks down, when a face that should not work somehow does, when the divergence from tidy symmetry becomes its own kind of magnetism. The New Yorker writer closes the piece with Henry James, who wrote that there is only one recipe for developing genuine taste: “to care a great deal for the cookery.” Clavicular, who has told interviewers he hasn’t heard of Bruce Springsteen and doesn’t do anything for fun, who concedes grudgingly that he can “put up with” watching movies occasionally, has no cookery to care about. He has only measurements.
The tragedy is not that he is wrong about beauty. It is that he has organized his entire life around a question that is not the real question, and in doing so has built an elaborate, expensive, painful structure on top of the actual wound without ever addressing the wound itself.
What I See When I Look at This
I want to put on a different hat now. Not the cultural critic hat, though I’ve been wearing it for a while and I think it’s doing some work. The coach hat. Because what I see when I look at looksmaxxing is not primarily a social media trend or a subculture or even an ideology. I see a diagnostic portrait of a very specific kind of human suffering. And I see it clearly because I’ve spent years building a framework designed to address exactly that suffering, one layer at a time.
Let me introduce you to some foundational concepts, because nothing that follows will land the way I intend it to land if these terms arrive as jargon rather than as real things you can feel.
The Performed Self
Most people are not living as who they actually are. I want to say that again without the qualifier softening it: most people, including many who appear confident and successful and self-possessed, are primarily living as a version of themselves that was constructed for someone else’s requirements.
This is not a failure. It is an adaptive response to a universal human reality. From the earliest days of childhood, we are implicitly and explicitly taught what version of ourselves is acceptable to the people and systems we depend on for safety, belonging, love, and approval. We learn what to perform. We learn what to suppress. We learn which parts of ourselves generate warmth and which generate withdrawal, and we adjust accordingly. Over time, across years of repetition, the performance becomes so habitual that it stops feeling like a performance. It starts to feel like the self.
The problem is that underneath the performance, the actual self, the one with its own particular textures and appetites and ways of being in the world, never went anywhere. It just went quiet. And quiet is not the same as gone.
People feel the gap between the performed self and the actual self almost universally, even when they cannot name it. It shows up as a chronic low-grade restlessness that doesn’t respond to rest. A persistent sense of fraudulence, the specific feeling of wearing a costume that fits but doesn’t belong to you. Relationships that function but don’t nourish. Work that produces results but doesn’t generate meaning. Success that arrives and leaves you standing in the middle of the achievement thinking: is this it? I did the thing. Why doesn’t it feel like I thought it would?
That feeling is not ingratitude. It is not depression, though it can look like it. It is not weakness or spiritual deficiency. It is the self, knocking from the inside, saying: something here is not true.
The looksmaxxer hears that knock. What the movement gives him is a false translation of it.
Invisible Contracts
Part of what keeps the performed self in place is what I call invisible contracts. These are the unspoken, unwritten agreements we accumulate over time about who we are allowed to be, what we are allowed to want, what expressions of self are acceptable in the environments we inhabit. They are not negotiated consciously. They form through observation, through the repetition of reward and punishment, through the learned patterns of what is safe and what is dangerous in the specific context of our upbringing and community.
An invisible contract might look like this, if it could be spoken aloud: in this family, strength means not needing anything from anyone. People who express need are burdens. Being a burden means being abandoned. Therefore I will not have needs, or at least I will never show them. No one gave that speech. It was simply the operating reality of the environment, absorbed without language by a person who was too young to question it and too dependent to resist it.
Another might read: in this culture, your worth is demonstrated by how you look and what you can attract. People who are unattractive are overlooked. Being overlooked means not mattering. Therefore I must become as visually optimal as possible, regardless of cost. This one is rarely stated so plainly. It is transmitted instead through advertising imagery, through social media engagement patterns, through the differential treatment of attractive and unattractive people that every person observes across their entire lives and almost no one examines.
Invisible contracts are not broken by willpower or by insight alone. Knowing the contract exists does not automatically dissolve it. They are broken by the slow, deliberate work of discovering what is actually true about who you are underneath them, and learning, over time, to live from that rather than from the contract. This is the work. It is not quick. It is not comfortable. And it is not done by optimizing your face.
The States of Field
Over years of working with people through some of the most significant transitions of their lives, I developed a framework for mapping where a person actually is in their relationship with their own identity. I call it the States of Field. Think of it as an interior topography, a way of identifying the terrain someone is navigating, not how they appear from the outside but what is actually operative from the inside.
The framework maps eleven states across a spectrum. At the most contracted end is what I call the Suppressed state. A person in this state is operating almost entirely from the performed self. Their authentic identity has been so thoroughly covered by the adaptive construction, so thoroughly shaped by invisible contracts and the requirements of their environment, that they have very little conscious access to who they actually are beneath the performance. They function. They may even appear successful. But the self that is running the show was built for someone else’s world, and on some level they know it.
At the most expanded end is what I call Transmitting. A person in this state is not performing a self. They are living from one. The gap between who they are and how they move through the world has been substantially closed, not by forcing the actual self to comply with external requirements, but by doing enough of the work that the performance is no longer the primary operating system. They are generating from the inside out rather than managing from the outside in. What they think, what they say, and how they live carry a coherence that is recognizable to people around them, even if those people can’t name exactly what they’re responding to. It is simply the particular quality of a person who is not managing a gap.
Between these poles are nine other states, each with its own texture, its own particular costs, its own specific invitation toward the next movement. The framework is not a ladder you climb by trying harder. It is a map. You can only navigate it if you know where you are.
Most people spend most of their lives somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, not because they are broken or deficient, but because no one ever told them the map existed. No one told them there was something to discover underneath the performance they learned to give, or that the discovery was worth making, or that it was even possible. Looksmaxxing is what happens when a person is stuck deep in the contracted end of this spectrum and the only tool they have been handed is a measuring instrument pointed at their own face.
The HALL Moment
HALL stands for Has A Limit Line. It names the moment when the performed self reaches the edge of what it can sustain at its current cost. Something breaks, or shifts, or snaps. A relationship ends and you realize you don’t know who you are without the role it required you to play. A career success arrives and leaves you hollow in a way you cannot explain. A health crisis, a loss, a failure, a long stretch of quiet, or sometimes just a particular Tuesday afternoon when the accumulated weight of living at a distance from yourself becomes suddenly, undeniably present.
The HALL Moment is not a problem. It is an invitation. It is the self, having spent years knocking quietly, finally knocking loudly enough that it can no longer be ignored. The question it poses is not “what went wrong?” It is: “Are you ready to find out what is actually true about who you are?”
Most people respond to the HALL Moment by trying to fix the surface. Change the job. Leave the relationship. Move to a new city. Restructure the performance rather than examine it. And looksmaxxing is, in a very precise way, a HALL Moment response: something feels wrong and undeniable, the knock has gotten loud enough to hear, and the response is to rebuild the container with greater intensity rather than to look at what’s inside it.
The energy of a HALL Moment is real. The motivation, the willingness to sacrifice, the capacity for discipline that looksmaxxing communities channel into physical optimization, all of that is genuine energy that belongs to genuine pain. The movement does not manufacture suffering. It redirects it. That redirection is the tragedy.
The Path to Freedom: What the Actual Work Looks Like
The framework I have built for walking people through the interior work of identity is called the Path to Freedom. It moves through six phases, each one addressing a different layer of what it takes to get from the contracted end of the States of Field spectrum to something that genuinely resembles autonomy. The phases are Impetus, Discovery, Alignment, Refinement, Amplification, and Mastery.
I want to walk you through the first few briefly, because the relationship between this framework and the looksmaxxing phenomenon is not abstract. It is exact.
Impetus is where most journeys begin, and it is where looksmaxxers are living, mostly without knowing it. Impetus is the recognition, often arrived at through a HALL Moment, that the current trajectory of life is not sustainable or not true. It is the knock that has gotten loud enough to hear. The looksmaxxer has impetus. He knows something is wrong. He feels the gap. He is motivated, often intensely motivated, disciplined to a degree that most people in his demographic are not, and willing to accept significant pain in service of a goal. He has, in other words, everything required to begin real work. What he does not have is the correct map.
Discovery is the second phase, and it is the one that looksmaxxing entirely bypasses. Discovery is the work of peeling back the layers of the performed self and beginning to ask, with genuine curiosity and without a predetermined answer, who am I actually, underneath what I learned to be? What do I actually think, as distinct from what I learned to think? What do I actually want, as distinct from what I learned to want? What parts of myself did I suppress in order to be acceptable, and what would it mean to let them back into the room?
This is not comfortable work. It requires sitting with the dissonance between the performed self and the actual self long enough to start distinguishing between them, which is genuinely difficult when you have been performing for so long that you have largely forgotten you are doing it. It requires being willing to be wrong about yourself, which is one of the most underrated forms of courage available to a human being.
Discovery does not produce a new and better performance. It produces genuine contact with what was always there. That is a fundamentally different experience, and it does not look anything like refining your gonial angle.
The Alignment phase, which follows Discovery, is where the structural work begins. Once a person has meaningful access to who they actually are underneath the performance, the work becomes building a life that is coherent with that actual self rather than with the invisible contracts that shaped the constructed version. This is practical work: it changes how people relate to others, what work they choose to pursue, what they are willing to accept from their environments, and how they handle the ongoing pressure to revert to the performed self that the people and systems around them have come to expect.
None of this, none of a single phase of the Path to Freedom, is about how you look. It is about who you are. And the reason that distinction matters is not because physical health is unimportant. It is because no amount of external optimization touches the thing that is actually causing the pain.
The energy is real. The motivation is real. The willingness to sacrifice is real. The map is wrong.
The Autonomy Commission: What We’re Building and Why
The Autonomy Commission is the organization through which I do this work. The name carries both meanings I intend deliberately. A commission, in one sense, is an authorization, a granting of permission to act. In another sense, it is a charge, a work you are given to do. The Autonomy Commission is both: the work of granting yourself permission to be who you actually are, and taking seriously the responsibility to do that work with intention, rigor, and honesty.
Autonomy, as I use the term, does not mean independence in the popular sense: the self-sufficient loner who needs nothing and answers to no one. That is not freedom. That is performance of a different kind, usually the performance of someone whose invisible contracts include the premise that needing other people is dangerous. True autonomy is not the absence of relationship or dependence. It is the presence of a self that is genuinely operative, that makes choices from a discovered center rather than from a set of accumulated contracts, that can receive care and give it without either act threatening its structural integrity.
The work I do through the Autonomy Commission is the same work the Path to Freedom describes, applied across a range of contexts: one-on-one intensive coaching, group programs, written frameworks, and increasingly the development of diagnostic tools that help people locate themselves on the States of Field spectrum with enough specificity to know what movement is actually available to them from where they are.
The clients I work with are not, for the most part, looksmaxxers. They are people in the middle of their lives who have achieved by most external measures what they set out to achieve, and who are standing in the middle of that achievement wondering why it doesn’t feel like freedom. They are people who are excellent at performing the version of themselves that their environments require and who have begun, often through a HALL Moment, to suspect that the excellence of the performance is part of the problem rather than the solution. They are people who are ready, or who are becoming ready, to find out what is actually true.
What I notice is that the looksmaxxing population and this population are drawing water from the same well. They are both responding to the same fundamental wound: the belief, absorbed early and maintained long, that the self as it actually exists is insufficient and requires modification before it is fit for the world. The looksmaxxer modifies the surface. My clients modify the performance. The direction is the same. Only the method differs.
And UNBOUND?
UNBOUND is both a personal posture and the title of the work I am building that captures the full arc of this journey. It is what a person looks like when they have done enough of the interior work that the performance is no longer the primary operating system. When the self that is moving through the world is, with reasonable honesty, the self that actually exists.
It is not a destination in the sense of a fixed endpoint where the work is finished and you rest. It is a direction of travel. An orientation. A person who is UNBOUND is not perfect, not beyond struggle, not immune to the pressures of environments that continue to push toward performance. They are simply no longer primarily organized around the invisible contract. The gap between who they are and how they live has been closed substantially, not by forcing the actual self to comply with the performance, but by retiring the performance in favor of the real thing.
UNBOUND has a quality that I can only describe as settled. Not passive. Not quiet necessarily, and often quite the opposite. But settled at a level beneath the activity, rooted in something that does not require management or maintenance because it is simply true. It does not need to be defended because it does not feel threatened. It does not need to be performed because it is not contingent on external response. It simply is, and moves accordingly.
The New Yorker piece closes with Henry James’s recipe for developing genuine taste: “to care a great deal for the cookery.” The writer uses it to diagnose Clavicular’s fundamental incapacity, his inability to engage with beauty as an art rather than a science, his indifference to everything that cannot be measured. But I think it applies more broadly than the writer intends.
Caring greatly for the cookery is, in a deeper sense, what all of the interior work I have described actually is. It is the practice of caring, with genuine attention and without a predetermined outcome, about the actual contents of your life. What you think. What you feel. What you want. Who you are when you are not being watched and not being evaluated. The cookery is the self, and most people have been so thoroughly discouraged from caring about it, so comprehensively redirected toward the performance and the external measurement and the score, that they have nearly forgotten it is there to care about.
Looksmaxxing is what happens when the hunger to be seen, to matter, to have your existence confirmed as real and valuable, meets an ideology that has no concept of an interior life. That hunger is not pathological. It is the most human thing there is. But the ideology that channels it into mathematics and hammer strikes and PSL scores is doing something genuinely cruel: it is taking the energy that belongs to discovery and redirecting it entirely outward, into the construction of a surface that cannot, by its own design, be finished.
The shop window is magnificent. The shop is empty.
UNBOUND is the shop, fully stocked, not the window.
The Larger Point
The New Yorker writer lands the piece with the jolie laide concept it opened with. The observation is elegant and true: Clavicular is almost certainly unaware of the phenomenon because it is anathema to his thirst for simple, calculable guidelines. Jolie laide cannot be scored. It emerges precisely where the formula breaks. It is what beauty does when it escapes optimization.
The writer’s final diagnosis is that Clavicular “regards beauty as a science rather than an art,” and that this misapprehension is the source of both his project’s internal logic and its ultimate failure. I think that is right. And I want to extend it one step further.
The same misapprehension applies not just to beauty but to the self. The self is not a science. It is not a set of metrics to be optimized toward an external standard. It is not raw material waiting to be refined into something finally presentable. It is the most specific thing in the world, particular to you, irreducible to anyone else’s taxonomy, and it cannot be improved in the direction that looksmaxxing or its quieter cultural equivalents propose, because the direction is wrong. You cannot optimize toward an authentic self. You can only discover one.
The work is not renovation. It is excavation. You are not building something new. You are uncovering something that was always there, underneath the performance, underneath the invisible contracts, underneath the years of adaptation to environments that could not see you clearly. It is slower than optimization. It is more demanding in the ways that matter and less demanding in the ways that don’t. And it produces something that no measurement can capture and no PSL scale can rate.
It produces a person who is, finally and simply, themselves.
Jolie laide. Fascinatingly, compellingly, irresistibly themselves.
The formula was never the point. You were.
Sources and References
Primary article engaged throughout this essay: The New Yorker, Critics’ Notebook, “The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement.” All direct quotations from the article are reproduced for purposes of critical commentary and engagement.
[1] The New Yorker, Critics’ Notebook. “The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement.” newyorker.com, 2026.
[2] Wikipedia. “Clavicular (influencer).” Sourced from The New York Times (Joseph Bernstein), Rolling Stone, GQ, and primary stream documentation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clavicular_(influencer).
[3] Thelot, Ruby Justice. “Looksmaxxing and the Quantification of Culture.” SSENSE Editorial, March 2026. ssense.com.
[4] The Conversation. “How looksmaxxing self-improvement apps are marketing misogyny to young men.” March 10, 2026. theconversation.com.
[5] Daily Campus. “Looksmaxxing and its revealing social philosophy.” March 2, 2026. dailycampus.com.
[6] Healthline / Northeastern University. “Looksmaxxing: The Toxic Trend Pushing Men to Maximize Their Looks.” March 2026. healthline.com; news.northeastern.edu.
[7] Yale Daily News. “How looksmaxxing became a powerful punchline.” yaledailynews.com.
[8] Williams, Thomas Chatterton. The Atlantic, January 2026. Referenced via The New Yorker article: looksmaxxing described as “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”
[9] Sontag, Susan. “Simone Weil.” New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963. Reprinted in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
[10] James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Longman’s Magazine, September 1884. Reprinted in Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1888.
[11] Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Originally published 1867. “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” Chapter 1, Section 4. Standard English translation: Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Body image and eating disorder statistics referenced in the section on broader cultural influence draw from published research by the National Eating Disorders Association, the American Psychological Association reports on male body image (2022, 2024), and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons annual statistics reports (2020-2025).