What if the most radical form of self-optimisation was also the simplest?
The internet has given us a new word—or rather, a new suffix. Maxxing. It started in the darker corners of the manosphere: looksmaxxing, statusmaxxing, the relentless gamification of male self-worth. But language, like water, finds its own level. These days people are fibremaxxing, hobbymaxxing, even regular-maxxing—deliberately returning to the same café, the same faces, the same rituals, because familiarity turns out to be its own kind of nourishment.
The suffix has broken free of its origins. It simply means: maximise this thing. Make it your practice. Go all in.
So here’s my contribution to the zeitgeist, from an old chook who has been watching all of this with considerable interest: kindnessmaxxing.
Not kindness as a personality trait you either have or don’t. Not kindness as naivety or weakness or people-pleasing dressed up in softer language. Kindness as a deliberate, daily, strategic practice—applied to every decision, every interaction, every moment where you have a choice about how to show up.
What does kindnessmaxxing actually look like? It looks like the checkout operator’s name on a badge that you actually use. It looks like the pause before you send the email. It looks like assuming the most generous interpretation of what just happened, before you assume the worst. It looks like the crowd at a dawn service on Anzac Day that drowned out a boo with applause—because they chose, in that moment, to be the loudest thing in the room.
Here’s what the manosphere got genuinely wrong in its maxxing framework: it built an entire system around outperforming other people. Mog your competitors. Raise your numbers. Climb the hierarchy. But a life measured only against others is an exhausting and ultimately hollow pursuit—because the finish line keeps moving and the metrics keep shifting and you’re always, somehow, still not enough.
Kindnessmaxxing runs on a completely different logic. It’s not about outperforming anyone. It’s about becoming, incrementally and intentionally, the version of yourself you’d actually want to encounter on a hard day.
And—here’s the part the data keeps confirming—it turns out that kindness is wildly effective. As a leadership strategy, a community-building tool, a business practice and a personal compass, it delivers returns that status and dominance simply cannot match. People remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what you said. Trust, built slowly through consistent small kindnesses, is the infrastructure everything else runs on.
So. Are you in?
Pick one moment today. One tiny decision. Run it through the lens: what’s the kindest version of this?
That’s kindnessmaxxing.
It scales.
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