What is “maxxing”, and why are people optimising everything?
Why a suffix became a word of the year, how a named target turns a habit into a status game, and what research says about measuring and maximising.
Answer to the question
What is “maxxing”, and why are people optimising everything?
Maxxing is a suffix added to almost any noun to mean pursuing it to the fullest. It spreads because a named, measurable target turns a habit into a visible status game. Research finds that measuring an activity can raise how much people do while lowering how much they enjoy it.
Key takeaways
- A major online dictionary named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year on 26 October; it can attach to almost any noun and traces back to minimax in game theory and the min-maxing of tabletop role-players.
- Will Storr's The Status Game describes success games as ranking people on closely specified outcomes, and a suffix that fixes the target is a quick way for a habit to enter one.
- In four studies, Berger and Heath found people diverged from the majority most in categories tied to self-expression, such as music, and least in functional goods (2007).
- In six experiments, Etkin found that measuring an activity increased how much people did of it and reduced how much they enjoyed it (2016).
- Students with the strongest maximising tendency took jobs with starting salaries about 20 per cent higher and were less satisfied with them (Iyengar, Wells and Schwartz, 2006).
A news report on the announcement says a major online dictionary has chosen a suffix as this year's Word of the Year. Maxxing, the report explains, means pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimising some part of your life, and it can attach to almost any noun. The report adds that the entry traces the word through game theory and the min-maxing of tabletop role-players, and records self-mocking variants, nothingmaxxing among them.
Its examples range from a quiet night in, to using AI tools at work, to borrowing the habits of an Italian grandmother. What interests the research is less the word than the habit of mind it names: a number to push upward, a public way of showing it, and a community that recognises both.
Is maxxing just self-improvement?
Improvement has a direction and, sooner or later, a place to stop. Maxxing has a scale and no ceiling, which is why the suffix travels so easily from study to routines to travel plans. Whatever comes before it becomes a number to push upward.
Will Storr's The Status Game gives a way to see why that appeals. Storr describes success games as the ones where rank goes to people who reach closely specified outcomes through skill, and he argues that social media is a status game whose rules have been tuned to make play competitive. A suffix that fixes the target is a quick way to enter such a game: once a habit has a name and a measure, other people can see how it is going and compare.
Jonah Berger and Chip Heath found a related pattern across four studies on identity signalling. People moved away from the majority choice most strongly in categories tied to self-expression, such as music, and much less in functional goods such as backpacks. They also dropped preferences they shared with many others when a product was linked to identity. A routine that is named, shared and visible behaves like a self-expressive category, so the word does some of the work that a product choice would otherwise do.
What does scoring do to habits?
Jordan Etkin ran six experiments on personal quantification. Measuring an activity increased how much people did of it and reduced how much they enjoyed it, and she attributed the drop to measurement weakening intrinsic motivation, so that an activity people liked started to feel like work. The finding fits the maxxing pattern closely: the count goes up, and the reason for doing the thing can shift from liking it to producing the figure.
The finding is not universal. A 2021 survey by Stephen Flora and Kristopher Brown asked avid cyclists about the devices they use to track rides. Most of the device users reported high enjoyment and said that tracking made cycling more interesting. The two results sit together comfortably if enjoyment depends on who is measuring, what they care about and how much the activity mattered to them before the number arrived.
Scores can also redirect choices. Christopher Hsee and colleagues called the effect medium maximization: when effort earns a token such as points, the token can change which option people pick among options that differ in what they actually deliver. A streak counter, a leaderboard rank or a weekly total plays the same role in maxxing, a theme explored in Why Loyalty Points Sit Unspent and in Why We Keep Our Streaks Going. People then optimise the token, and the thing the token stood for follows, if it follows at all.
Sheena Iyengar, Rachael Wells and Barry Schwartz followed students through their final-year job search after measuring how strongly each tended to seek the best possible option. The students with the strongest maximising tendency took jobs with starting salaries about 20 per cent higher, and they were also less satisfied with those jobs. The authors traced the gap to a heavier reliance on outside information and to a fixation on both the options taken and the options passed over.
Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice built the wider case for separating maximisers from satisficers, a distinction whose evidence is firmer where it is tied to behaviour and thinner where it rests on self-report. The two pieces of evidence give a fair reading of maxxing as a habit of mind: the effort can buy a better objective result, and a comparison with unchosen alternatives can reduce the satisfaction that result brings.
What does it say about status?
Maxxing is less about any one habit than about the scoreboard that comes with it. Storr's success game needs a measure that others can read, and the suffix supplies one for free. The measurement research then suggests what happens next: attention moves from the activity to the number, and the number begins to steer choices, which is the point Goodhart's Law makes about any target that people start to aim at.
That does not make the trend foolish. Plenty of people enjoy a project with a clear target, and the cyclists in the survey did. Does gamification work covers the wider question of when scores and ranks help people along and when they crowd out the activity itself, and the answer there is the same: it depends on whether the person wanted the score in the first place.
A status game with a visible score is also a social one, and some of the appeal of maxxing is belonging to a group that shares the same measure and the same vocabulary for talking about it. The same instinct is behind how quiet signals work in Why We Read Quiet Logos as Status, where the audience, not the object, decides what a signal means.
Three questions help tell a working maxxing project from a loud one.
- Who is the scoreboard for: the person doing the thing, or the people watching?
- Does the number still track what the project was meant to produce?
- Would the activity still be worth doing for the person who does it if nobody else ever saw the figure or heard about the project, and would they still choose the same target after a few weeks of doing it without any audience at all?
Common questions
What is “maxxing”, and why are people optimising everything?
Maxxing is a suffix added to almost any noun to mean pursuing it to the fullest. People apply it widely because a named, measurable target turns a habit into a visible status game, as Will Storr describes in The Status Game.
Where does the word maxxing come from?
According to the news report, the dictionary traces it to minimax in game theory and the min-maxing of tabletop role-players, then to online users who swapped min for max and added an extra x. The report says the choice was announced on 26 October 2026.
Does measuring an activity make people enjoy it less?
In six experiments, Jordan Etkin found that measurement raised how much people did and lowered how much they enjoyed it. A survey of avid cyclists found most tracker users enjoyed riding, so the effect depends on the person and the activity.
Is this article advice?
No. It is general information about research on behaviour and social trends, and it gives no guidance on appearance, health or routines. Questions about those belong with a qualified professional.
Sources
Storr, W. The Status Game. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Status Game.
Etkin, J. (2016). The Hidden Cost of Personal Quantification. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(6), 967-984. doi:10.1093/jcr/ucv095 https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv095
Hsee, C. K., Yu, F., Zhang, J., & Zhang, Y. (2003). Medium Maximization. Journal of Consumer Research, 30(1), 1-14. doi:10.1086/374702 https://doi.org/10.1086/374702
Iyengar, S. S., Wells, R. E., & Schwartz, B. (2006). Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the Best Job Undermines Satisfaction. Psychological Science, 17(2), 143-150. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01677.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01677.x
Berger, J., & Heath, C. (2007). Where Consumers Diverge from Others: Identity Signaling and Product Domains. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(2), 121-134. doi:10.1086/519142 https://doi.org/10.1086/519142
Flora, S. R., & Brown, K. J. (2021). Hidden in Plain Sight: The Psychological Benefits of Personal Quantification. International Journal of Psychology & Behavior Analysis, 7(1). doi:10.15344/2455-3867/2021/174 https://doi.org/10.15344/2455-3867/2021/174
Gulf News (2026). Report on the 2026 Word of the Year announcement of 26 October 2026. https://gulfnews.com/lifestyle/what-does-maxxing-mean-after-6-7-its-now-dictionarycoms-word-of-the-year-sigh-maxxing-1.500725384