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
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 properly. The mechanisms that allowed them to adapt, survive and reproduce no longer prove adaptive or tend to reproduction. In fact, they prove fatal.
Maybe that’s true of humans too. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, wrote similar things about modern man and his “surrogate activities,” pastimes that offer no real compelling substitute for the genuine struggles of life but are the only avenue for fulfillment left today. Man essentially drives himself to distraction, in whatever way he can, because that’s all there is left to do.
Certainly, looking at looksmaxxing’s current poster-boy Clavicular – real name: Braden Eric Peters, age: 20 – it’s hard not to ask: How is this going to end? “Badly” seems to be the near-universal answer.
Clav – as he’s affectionately known – has already overdosed on drugs on livestream. He ran over someone in his Tesla Cybertruck on livestream (although that might have been staged). He was arrested for possession of illegal drugs in Arizona, including steroids, and for shooting an alligator in the Everglades – again on livestream. An ex-girlfriend of his is now suing him for injecting her face with fat-dissolving peptides and methamphetamine – on livestream – while she was just 17. She claims he did so without her proper consent, and that he also raped her.
His latest nose surgery is widely reckoned to have disfigured him, even though it apparently makes him face conform more to the Pythagorean strictures of the looksmaxxing dogma. He’s adding ever-more substances to his “stack,” which already reads like the famous roll-call of ships in The Iliad: adderall, anavar, dextromethorphan, pregabalin, ketamine, 1,4-butanediol, minoxidil… He wants further surgeries too: a “double” jaw surgery so his jaw “projects” better, titanium cheekbone implants, further rhinoplasty, leg-lengthening surgery (he’s only 6’) and maybe even phalloplasty (“dickmaxxing”) as well.
Honestly, what next?
Last week, maybe we got our answer. One of the “OG” looksmaxxers, Connor Murphy, died aged 32 in Thailand. Murphy apparently drowned in a lake, but the exact circumstances of his death are unclear at present. There have been wild claims of about his behavior in the lead-up to his death, which isn’t surprising, given his steady unmooring from reality over the last five or six years, as evidenced in his video content. According to looksmaxxer “Androgenic,” one of the new crop of looksmaxxers, Murphy had become fixated with gold, believing it was a special metal that was being “gatekept” by “elites.” He started having gold injected into his body, which caused discoloration of his skin.
Newspaper reporting claims syringes and drug-bottles were found in his filthy apartment.
Murphy emerged on the internet scene in the early 2010s as a provider of gym-based content. He posted fitness-advice videos, including videos on how to achieve “natural” transformations (he was on steroids) and how to maximize your attractiveness, but he also made edgier content designed to go viral and illustrate looksmaxxing theories about male appearance and the fickleness of women. He would take his shirt off in public in front of women and film their reactions, and he would do the same in gyms, “mogging” unfortunate short men in front of their girlfriends. Before TikTok, he was one of the most recognizable figures in the online fitness world, with millions of YouTube subscribers.
4chan’s “/fit/” forum, a sub-page for discussing fitness, is now awash with theories about why Murphy lost his mind. Some say things started to go wrong for him when he began losing his hair, perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a looksmaxxer apart from being born sub-6’. He took finasteride, a popular anti-hair-loss drug. Finasteride has a wealth of potentially devastating side effects, ranging from erectile dysfunction and reduced libido, to psychological symptoms including depression, anxiety and panic attacks, anhedonia (emotional blunting), impaired thinking and suicidal ideation and behavior. These symptoms are often referred to as “post-finasteride syndrome,” because they can persist for months or years after cessation of the drug.
Maybe finasteride made him mad?
A more credible theory is heavy psychedelic use. Murphy was open about his turn to drugs like ayahuasca and psilocybin, beginning in about 2020. This is a common trajectory for bros these days, encouraged by podcasters like Joe Rogan, who rather blithely advocates DMT-trips on the basis of his own positive experiences. In June 2020, after his first dose of ayahuasca, Murphy posted a long, rambling, often incoherent video on YouTube titled, “I’m Having a Mental Breakdown and I Need Help (Confession)”. Through tears, he describes the “dissolution” of his ego: “The self, the idea of Connor Murphy, the ego, it’s a mental construct in the brain, that’s it. And it’s breaking down. Oh, it’s breaking down hardcore.”
His use of psychedelics increased, and with it the strangeness of his content. His attempts to improve his physical and mental health took a series of more and more esoteric turns: brutally long fasts, drinking his urine and his friend’s semen (really), and eating raw meat. Murphy referred to the semen cocktail as a “divine protein shake” and said, “You gotta swallow to get swole.”
He wasn’t joking.
So far, Clav has shown little interest in opening the gates of perception, but it’s obviously the next stage for the modern individual concerned with optimizing himself at every single level, without limits and without any goal beyond optimization itself.
Perhaps we would all do well to heed Carl Jung’s warning about psychedelics: Beware unearned wisdom.
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