Death of a Looksmaxxer
What the fate of Connor Murphy tells us about the future of this new trend
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, including when he’s out at nightclubs? (That’s “bonesmashing,” by the way, a practice that’s supposed to encourage the growth of bone tissue in the cheeks and jaw, providing further shape and contour to the face, for a more masculine hunter-gatherer-type look.)
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.
And maybe 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 fulfilment 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. After achieving exit velocity in mere weeks and months, he now appears to be coming back down to earth equally fast.
