After years of grueling self-improvement movements – Healthmaxxing, Sleepmaxxing, Looksmaxxing, we’ve finally reached the logical endpoint. The latest vehicle of salvation? Retardmaxxing. This new meme ideology encourages its acolytes to reject over-analysis of decision-making, advocating a course of imperfect action over perpetual hesitation. The name alone will set shivers down the spine of every 2000s era primary school teacher who campaigned to excise the word ‘retard’ from their charges’ vocabulary. Yet Retardmaxxing could be a sorely welcome ideology in a Britain hamstrung by learned helplessness and conditioned inactivity. It could even be taught in schools to shake us from this malaise in our national psyche (picture the word now, cut out in gold lettering on a primary school display board).
One coarse metric I’ve been using for its validity is the success of schoolmates who were ‘a bit of a dick’. You know the type: they had innumerable harebrained schemes, some of which failed miserably, and professed to have a worldliness uncommon to their age (yet were often a bit of a knucklehead). Lots start down the well-trodden route of selling multipacks of Lucozade on the school playground, referring to themselves as an ‘entrepreneur’ on day two of setting up shop. Many got immediately shut down; others received a local news article for their ingenuity, and a fast track to micro-celebrity on Series 23 of The Apprentice.
Were you to follow their exploits decades down the line, you’ll likely find a mixed bag, but the most successful of the cohort would likely be among them. The head boys all ended up working at a consultancy firm (BCG and Bain must have some kind of right of first refusal on minor public school prefects), yet the devil-may-care rulebreakers were the ones who ended up starting their own outlandish businesses. I remember back in 2016 arguing with a boy in my year who had got into crypto. At the time, Bitcoin was $600; it’s now $63,000, and he’s on his third startup. Being a naysayer may sound clever in the moment, but it’s a lot better to be rich than smug. Looking back, it’s also worth re-evaluating how much their ‘being a dick’ was actually envy over the confidence to feel like ‘the rules’ didn’t apply to them.
This is what Retardmaxxing is trying to tap into: the idea that there is no rulebook for making a go of it. Like many modern philosophies and ideologies, it’s just an age-old tenet repackaged as Gen Z slang. It is also a rather hopeful idea, offering the notion that those who succeed are not necessarily smarter, just far less reticent, and unafraid of failing once or twice. In the aforementioned mixed bag, you’ll also find a good few who ended up in prison or addicted to drugs. High risk tolerance goes both ways.
A number of people globally may have also started Retardmaxxing without knowing it. In the US, roughly 11 per cent of those aged six or older have had a Toxoplasma gondii infection. The disease, commonly passed on by cats, leads to people behaving more irrationally (it’s designed to make rodents less concerned about being eaten). Murderers are found in higher levels among the infected, but so are millionaires. In a Danish study, those infected were 29 per cent more likely to have founded a startup, and more than twice as likely to have done so as a solo founder. I’ve always thought it would be a good plot for a novel: using cat pee to turn yourself into a slightly less refined Tom Ripley.
I’m not suggesting the NHS prescribe cat urine nasal sprays as a way to awaken the sleeping British giant, but we could do with some more Retardmaxxing in the UK. A regional railway station footbridge should not be ten years overdue and £8.25m over budget (not to mention the 400 meetings and 600-page report they probably required). It is telling that Retardmaxxing was given a recent burst of support after it was mentioned by legendary founder and venture capitalist Marc Andresseen (a man whose skull had to expand upwards to accommodate his brain). In the business world, you can’t think your way into profitability, nor regulate your way into prosperity: if you fail to carry out your projects on time and in budget, you won’t get paid.
Retardmaxxing is a rather hopeful idea – those who succeed are not necessarily smarter, just far less reticent, and unafraid of failing once or twice
Retardmaxxing goes against the creaking grinding process we’ve accepted as the only route to get things done. Every so often, a figure attempts to cut the red tape and make things happen at pace. In the UK, Dominic Cummings; in the US, DOGE (the meme-inspired Department of Government Efficiency). They all end up failing, appalled at how deep the roots of inaction and incompetence stretch. Alienated and demoralised by the Kafkaesque path to getting things done, they end up in the bosom of the private sector: as Cummings likes to put it ‘the system working exactly as intended’.
The movement is one to be adopted by everyone who can’t help but wait for the conditions to be just perfect to carry out the plans that have been hatched for a while. Spoiler alert: they never are. I’m reminded of a tweet by an Observer journalist working on an article linking the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. Trump’s son tweeted the implicating email chain, leaving the journalist to tweet ‘I… worked on this story for a year…and…he just…he tweeted it out’. Often, quick and clumsy is the best option.
This simplest sounding of movements is the hardest one. Anyone can set their alarm early or load up on obscure Korean skincare products you can only buy in one street in Seoul. Yet nothing is harder for the modern British soul than publicly demonstrated effort and failure. In keeping with the 2000s school theme, there’s a distinctly British fear about going out on a limb – whether that be a new business or asking someone out on a date – where we fear for the proverbial lunch tray flying in the air and everyone going ‘wahey’.
The truth is, no one cares. They’re all too concerned with their own lives. Behaving a bit like an idiot will, on the whole, make your life a lot happier and more successful, even if it’s reimagined with a cringe-inducing Americanised lens. If the unexamined life is not worth living, how about the over-examined life?
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