The Importance of Present-Maxxing Our Lives

     2026 arrived with many things, to say the least, but one thing it has brought along is a linguistic morsel called “friction-maxxing.” Despite endless IG reels, TikToks, YouTube tutorials, and, of course, ChatGPT promising the promethean deliverance of ease, Kathryn Jezer-Morton rather offered us another way in her article “In 2026, we are friction-maxxing” in The Cut. Her point: happiness and satisfaction lie in resistance not convenience and automation. Friction-maxxing is choosing the harder option that requires more time, more thought, more emotion, and, often, more presence. It is through the avoidance of friction, emotional and mental disturbance, that we lose our humanity. Jezer-Morton calls for a return to an analog approach to our daily life. Examples would include hand-written notes over AI summaries, reading a book rather than watching the movie, or walking to work rather than driving. I would like to call for an even more persephonic embodiment of “friction-maxxing;” while friction-maxxing employs more material and mental effort to derive satisfaction, I would like to offer its emotional and empowering sibling: “Present-maxxing.” Now, before I unpack present maxxing, I find it best to present the problem it addresses in order to understand it in both breadth and depth. In order to do that, we need to talk about grief. Grief is the acclimation to reality after a loss. This loss presents itself. in a multitude of facets in human life.

     Grief is a response to death, but death is much more nuanced than we think. Death is simply the end. Most famously it is the end of life, but it also ushers in the end of a time in our lives. We feel it in break ups. We feel it in high school graduation. We see it in our children growing up. It is the ache in our chest as reality morphs in front of us without our consent. In Western tradition, we are given no tools to deal with this ache except for suppression. Grief is a long-standing abandoned emotion in our culture. People are expected to mourn their losses in the same way they are expected to use the toilet: quickly, efficiently, and cleanly. However, if you have ever found yourself experiencing grief, you know that it refuses to fit in such orderly constraints. When we are presented with such limited tools as suppression, death is a threat. It is the thief in the night that looms over us threatening to take away our happiness when we least expect it. For many of us, we were taught that death is a punishment; a karmic collapse of unworthiness and grief is our penance. I would like to offer another framework for death; one that empowers you to connect with reality as it shifts rather than constricting away from it. Pema Chödrön, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, often speaks of the concept of a “bardo.” A bardo is a transitional state that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. On the macro, we are born, we live, and we die. In the micro, we cook our food, we eat our food, and we digest our food. After each bardo ends, another begins. All of life in the constant movement in and out of bardos and how we show up in each of these states determines our satisfaction when they inevitably meet their end, and, too often, we find ourselves shocked at the grief that is ignited within us. How could we have been blind to the death that was coming? There is an unspoken belief in Western culture that, if we don’t think about it too much, perhaps the end will never come. If the end never comes, it will never bring with it grief, consequences, or accountability. 

   The truth is that the only absolute certainty that humans have is that we will lose everything and everyone and no one can escape that, but it is not this fact that causes grief to often be an unbearable experience. It is the realization that our pretending death was never coming, that the bardo would never end, led us to never put ourselves, our presence, into the moment. So, when it is over, there is nothing left; no memories, no emotion, no self. This is the precise problem that present-maxxing resolves. Present-maxxing, like friction-maxxing, asks you not to pull away from, but lean into each and every moment. It is to put your self, your emotions, to deepen and add weight to each bardo. We often lean away from moments that make us feel; we pull away and try to keep our emotions at a tolerable minimum. This is not a novel concept; Henry David Thorough speaks of it in Walden: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately... and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.” The core tenant of present-maxxing is that you want to be devastated at the end; you want to put so much emotion, presence, and selfhood into each experience that, when it ends, it is devastating. 

Devastation is not the enemy. It is your liberation. 

To live is to allow yourself to be so open to life that when a bardo, a life, a relationship, a time ends, what remains is the feeling of yourself when the past was still around. Grief is a gift. It is the opposite of ego. Ego seeks to hold up an identity to feel safe while grief promises the true rawness of who you actually were in a bardo. Present-maxxing allows you to face that rawness with empowerment not only because you can, once the physical mourning has been processed, use that grief to connect to your real self, but to now live knowing that you can survive devastation. What, I think, we truly fear, and mistake for devastation, is to face that rawness and feel regret.

Regret is the remnants of a reserved life in which you abandoned yourself for comfort rather than facing the friction of feeling. So, the next time you feel yourself checking out of a moment, choosing comfort, or taking the easy path, ask yourself “What do I want to feel when this moment is over?” What you will find is that while death and grief are as inevitable as winter, if you plant the seeds of yourself in the present, once winter passes, the spring of your selfhood will rise even stronger. Like Persephone, choose the chaos of hell so that you might return to us the renewal of who you really are. I think that’s what John Keating meant when he made the declaration: "Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.