Is the looksmaxxer a morality tale for our time – a sort of Hogarthian parable about everything, or at least some of the main things, that ail us as a society in 2026?

After all, could there be a greater indictment of the vanity of the vainest society in history than a young man who devotes his entire waking life to improving his appearance, and not only that, documents every second on camera for a legion of adoring fans and imitators? An otherwise perfectly handsome, fortunate young man obsessing so much over his looks that he spends a portion of each day hitting his face with a small rock hammer. 

The modern individual is concerned with optimizing himself without limits, without any goal beyond optimization itself

The modern individual is concerned with optimizing himself without limits, without any goal beyond optimization itself

There are other, darker, interpretations of looksmaxxing. There’s one, for example, that situates it at a biological level, as a kind of morbid symptom of prosperity and the aimlessness that comes with it. I’m not the only one who’s seen clear parallels between the rise of looksmaxxers and the so-called “mouse utopia” experiment conducted by John Calhoun. Mice were allowed to reproduce for generations in a controlled setting absent the threat of predation and in which all their basic needs – food, water – were catered for lavishly. After a certain number of generations of normal reproduction, things took a very strange turn. Among the wealth of sudden bizarre manifestations was a class of mice Calhoun dubbed “the Beautiful Ones.” These mice would obsessively clean and spruce themselves all day long. They did nothing else. They had no interest even in reproduction: only in themselves and the perfection of their image.

The implication: Freed from the struggle for life that has defined all living creatures since they crawled from the primordial soup, mice stop functioning........

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