We are living in the Age of the Maxxers.
That, anyway, is what Sam Kriss thinks; it's also what a surprising number of other cultural commentators, Substackers, and NPR hosts think as well. Moderation is out; normalcy is out; morality itself is out. It doesn't matter what you maxx; pick something, anything, and maxx it.
I don't believe in this trend; I don't believe in any trend that NPR hosts and Substackers tell me about, beginning with AI but also including Traditionalism, Social Media, the Alt Right, and facts. I am, as Dr. Ian Cameron once said, an educator in daily contact with young minds.
Nevertheless, like many fake trends talked about by people on the Internet, the term "maxxing" does in fact designate something--though what it designates is not in fact a fad originated by a few teenagers, but a pervasive cultural viewpoint that has structured our social and economic lives for many decades and is now mostly exemplified by people over fifty. This is true of every one of the trends mentioned above.
This particular viewpoint is easily defined, if not necessarily easily understood: it is merely what happens when people try to do ethics and live human life without believing in transcendent ends.
Hence the modest purpose of this short essay: to point out the exceptionally simple, straightforward, and obvious fact that without a robust and practical acceptance of transcendence as a pervasive feature of human life and action, it is impossible to construct a coherent ethical system, impossible to live a human life, and utterly impossible to be happy.
Ethics and Motivation
Ethics is the science of human action: practical ethics is the craft of actually making decisions in human life as it is. For some strange reason, neither is taught as part of American education, or discussed as part of American public discourse: as Cardinal Mercier said to the German military governor in 1914, au contraire. I would go so far as to say that in 2026 American institutional, social, legal, and political structure, beginning in schools and extending through corporations up to the government itself, is defined by a profound and pervasive aversion to ethics as such.
There are ideological reasons for this, in part. Many Americans have been taught to see "morality" as something inherently religious, and therefore inherently individual and subjective and arbitrary and expressive and having no important real-world consequences for anyone whatsoever. Many other Americans have been taught to see "ethics" as an abstract problem of corporate resource management and legal compliance best dealt with by academics and corporate ethicists. None of these people, though, seem to realize that ethics is just a word for any means by which any person decides to choose one thing as opposed to another--and hence is as widespread and consequential as human acts themselves.
Still, what I despair of is conveying the degree to which ethics in this sense is not merely abstract, but practical and immediate and visceral for nearly all of us nearly all the time.
When we think about ethics, we should not think about academics sitting in an office typing on a word processor; we should certainly not think about corporate ethicists on a review board getting paid to rubber stamp abominations; we should not even think about people tied to a trolley track, or Jews hidden in an attic, or any of the other extremes of human thought or history. We should, think, rather, about the people we have known, and the choices they have made--the many, many, many ways in which people have surprised us and done what we would never have anticipated they would do, hooked up with someone, dated someone, cheated on someone, married someone, divorcied someone, took the job, quit the job, moved or not moved, drank or not drank, did drugs or did not do drugs, lied or told the truth, flaked out or stayed committed, gave up or kept fighting, lived or died. Even better, we should think about ourselves, and the choices we have made, and why.
It is remarkable how little people in America are taught to do this--or even are willing to do it. Americans, it seems to me, are pervasively educated into a practical ethics that I would call "avoidant self-deceptive voluntaristic compliance." By this philosophy, people are entirely unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, what they actually want and why they actually make the choices they do--and indeed seem to have the idea that there is nothing worse, more dangerous, or more shameful than letting slip to anyone at all their true motivations for anything. The result of this belief is that when people are faced with decisions, they do not seek advice or counsel or engage in rational deliberation, but make choices rapidly, automatically, and as much as possible in secret. Once a choice is made, however, a standardized, abstract, usually ideological ex post facto explanation is defensively applied, or usually several of them at once and/or in succession; and then the cycle is repeated.
There is a deeper reason, though, behind this pervasive American aversion to ethics: a reason that has to do, not with conscious ideology or belief, but with the more unconscious things that actually structure human life. American public and private and economic life has since at least the 19th century been structured primarily by and around mechanistic systems--which is to say, around the large-scale direction of acts made not by ethical agents, but by machines inherently and totally incapable of motivation, reasoning, or intentional action.
And it is really is true that for machines, ethics is strictly speaking irrelevant: all that matters is what is done, or more precisely what extrinsic effects are achieved. There is simply no answer to the question of what a canning machine should want, or even what a canning machine should do; there is not even really a meaningful answer to the question of what a canning machine is doing. All anyone can say, really, is what effects the canning machine is having (on the cans, say, or the broader assembly line process, or the company's bottom line, or the national GDP). And this is, to a real extent, simpler, at least for the purposes of large-scale statistical analysis.
Insofar as human beings are regarded simply and solely in relation to such machines and mechanistic systems, it can be easy to imagine that such ethical concerns are irrelevant for them too. I don't care, says Big Daddy Johnson, what good for themselves my workers are seeking that motivates them to work in my plant and turn the little handle on the canning machine 18 hours a day 7 days a week--all I care about are the extrinsic effects of their actions, which is to say, how many cans of Big Daddy's Best Dog Food are successfully produced and canned and put on trucks and shipped to every major market in America in a given 7-day period producing a certain profit margin and putting a certain number of fat envelopes of cash in my back pocket that I can theatrically get out and ruffle through while looking down at the dirty faces of my child laborers and laughing.
Still, the fact remains that Big Daddy is wrong. Even if one regards human beings merely as means and inputs for machines and mechanistic systems, it is nonetheless extremely, crucially important to remember that human beings are not machines: or, in other words, that human persons, and also incidentally animals and plants and bacteria, act out of interior motivations that aim at ends that are immanent, or, in other words, are considered good for the person acting.
This, again, might seem abstract and academic; but if this distinction is regarded as abstract and academic, then so, I regret to inform you, dear techno-optimist, is all of human history, all of human politics, all of human economics, all of human life, all of animal life, all of plant life, all of bacterial life, and in short more or less everything that has happened since the rise of the first single-celled lifeform ~4.5 billion years ago. If nothing else, it can be helpful to be able to tell apart, say, a tiger from a rock, especially if the tiger is trying to eat you.
If a canning machine unaccountably stops putting lids on cans, the best thing to do is to turn off the machine, grab a wrench, and start digging through the machine's innards until one finds the mechanical issue that has caused it stop working. If a factory worker unaccountably stops putting lids on cans, absolutely nothing will be accomplished by grabbing said wrench and attempting said operation. If one wants said factory worker to put lids on cans, it will be necessary to persuade the worker that it will in fact be good for him to put said lids on said cans: by paying him, say, or by threatening to beat him to death with the wrench if he does not. There are admittedly important difference between these two methods; both, however, are equally appeals to the reality of the human interiority and motivation.
I wrote a lengthy post a while back on the nature of coercion--which is an important topic. Virtually all types and kinds and degrees of coercion, though, depend essentially on the realization that human beings act for ends and interior motivations. The one exception to this rule is what I called in that essay "mechanical coercion." I will take the unusual step of quoting myself:
"Sometimes a person or a state, in applying coercion, is concerned not that a person, any person, will the action as their own action, but merely that an action be performed. In such cases, there is a sense in which the concept of coercion is simply irrelevant, and also a sense in which such an institution is engaged, whether actually or potentially, in wielding coercion in a truly maximal sense.
Where coercion is applied on this principle, we may call it mechanical coercion, since persons are treated as mechanisms with no will and self-motivation and are therefore in principle entirely interchangeable with machines. Such mechanical coercion, where the presence of a human person or a human will is treated as irrelevant and coercion with merely the action in mind, represents a distinctive feature of modern governments and institutions. It is also, I would argue, always and everywhere immoral."
Whether or not such mechanical coercion is immoral, though, there can be no doubt that it is a terribly ineffective way of getting human beings to do what you want. The peril of forgetting that human beings are not machines is that one is not, as a rule, particularly successful at getting human beings to do anything.
And if there is one deep, underlying cause behind the chaos we see around us today in America and the world today, a chaos that is gradually resolving itself into a near-universal crisis of legitimacy, but which is most immediately at the moment taking the shape of pervasive institutional collapse, it is this basic inability, bordering on refusal, to understand that human beings cannot be dealt with like machines--that they must be persuaded, or at least threatened, tricked, or seduced, to do the things on which institutions depend.
AI thus far is a highly successful advertising effort, not to say con, to convince managers and rulers the world over that they can dispense with all methods of persuasion whatsoever in favor of replacing human beings entirely with machines. Unfortunately, this doesn't work--and indeed never will, since no matter how much labor you automate human societies and institutions will remain entirely creations of and subordinate to of the human will.
Anyway, so long as human persons exist, it will be necessary for human persons to decide what they will do, individually and collectively--and this will always take place through some system, explicit or implicit, of ethics.
Transcendence and Ethical Structure
To understand why transcendence is necessary for ethics, we have to think about ethics in a very different way than Americans are taught to--not abstractly or universally, but in terms of the actual sorts of choices that people make, and the ends they work to achieve, in the course of a normal human life, or even a normal human day.
If we think for even a moment about the goods that human beings habitually seek, however, we quickly realize that they are so disparate, so in tension and conflict and contradiction with each other, that without some way to organize them, we cannot make sense of them at all, and therefore cannot make a single rational choice.
A person wants food, and the pleasures that come from food; at the same time, a person wants to be fit and not eat too much or experience digestive discomfort; a person wants rest and comfort and an absence of pain; at the same time a person wants to accomplish something meaningful, to expend energy, to labor, to do difficult things, and hence to feel pain; a person wants affirmation from others; at the same time, a person wants to compete with and overcome others; a person wants to be loved personally and intimately; at the same time, a person wants to be alone; a person wants harmony; at the same time a person wants conflict; a person wants stability; at the same time, a person wants excitement; and so on.
All of these contradictory and conflicting goals are indelibly things that the person truly and actually and genuinely wants: so what does someone actually do? Someone has offered you a brownie. Do you eat the brownie or not eat the brownie? Eat one brownie? Eat five brownies? Ten? Thirty? And what if the brownie is poisoned?
Seen in these terms, the challenge of human ethics resolves itself into a straightforward example of the metaphysical problem of the unity of contraries. And in metaphysics, so in ethics, the only way to unify contraries is through transcendence.
For our present purposes, the simplest and broadest definition of transcendence is all that we need: namely, that a higher thing in some sense contains but goes beyond lower things. Carnivores and herbivores are opposed categories, but are transcended by the category of omnivores; ducks and geese are opposed categories, but are unified by the category of waterfowls; being a cow and being a raindrop are opposed categories, but are unified by the category of being; and so on.
From this, we can construct a base definition of what I will call ethical transcendence: namely, that a higher thing is the categorical end or goal of lower things, for the sake of which one seeks them; and therefore that said higher thing must always and everywhere and categorically be sought in preference to these lower things, regardless of their number or degree.
To take some of our examples above, if one has a choice between eating thirty brownies and immediately dying in agony, and not eating a brownie and living a happy and fulfilled life, it is obvious that the latter choice is the correct one: for the simple reason that "living a happy and fulfilled life" is the goal of the action "eating a brownie," and therefore must be chosen in preference to any number or degree of such actions, and therefore truly transcends them.
One does not need to say, in a functionalist way, that one only eats for the sake of physical health and fitness, and not enjoyment; still, it remains true that one eats brownies or anything else for the sake of having a happy and healthy and fulfilled life. Hence, it is sheer madness to think that any quantity or degree of brownies could make up for the loss of such a life. If I tell you that I cannot eat that brownie because it is poisoned, it is no rational response to tell me that it is after all a really good brownie; or to offer me a hundred more poisoned brownies as if that makes a difference to the calculation. No amount of haggling will get me to a number or quality of brownies that I would be willing to exchange for the value of my life.
Ethical transcendence is always and everywhere beyond number and degree as such; and this is the most straightforward way to detect its presence. No amount of tea is tradeable for the love of my parents; the experience of watching the best movie ever made is not worth never sleeping again; there is no number of goats I would accept in payment for my brother's self-respect; and so on.
Nor are such instances at all difficult to make systemic. The reason why certain goods transcend other goods is for the very simple reason that some of those goods are in fact entirely and intrinsically means, and some are at least relatively ends: and it is for this reason that no number or degree of the former can possibly add up to the latter. If my goal is to make it to China, no number of steps walking in a circle can possibly replace actually getting there. In the same way, given that all human pleasures originate from and are ordered to the basic human capacity for enjoyment, no number or degree of pleasures can possibly make up for the loss or destruction of that capacity. This is so not merely in experience and practice, but absolutely and necessarily and by definition.
More consequentially and controversially, given that human economic and political arrangements exist entirely as means for the good and happiness of human persons, it cannot be the case that any human economic or political arrangement justifies destroying the good and happiness of human persons. Given that human beings use weapons to preserve life, it is inherently irrational to make or use a weapon that destroys the human race as a whole. And so on.
Ultimately and fundamentally, given that all human acts whatsoever are ordered towards human happiness and fulfillment, no number and degree of goods can possibly take precedence over human happiness and fulfillment. Or, in other words, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world but lose his soul.
Ends and Proportions
Anyway, we are getting rather far afield from the promised trendy topic of maxxers; and I must atone.
My thesis should now, I hope, be somewhat clear: that what the underlying cultural orientation behind the nonexistent trend of "maxxing" actually indicates is a society defined by a pervasive rejection of the concept of ethical transcendence, or rather by an insane and irrational belief that one can achieve or at least simulate transcendent higher goods and ends through the indefinite multiplication of lower goods and means, or most cogently by an insane and irrational and totally self-contradictory belief that one can or ought to choose the indefinite multiplication of lower goods and means over transcendent higher goods and ends.
To take a straightforward example prominent in current discourse, the good of "sexual attractiveness" is by definition a means and therefore a lower good. A person seeks to be sexually attractive to the opposite sex in order to marry the opposite sex, or at least sleep with the opposite sex, or at the very least please the opposite sex. For this reason, it is obvious that a person who seeks to maximize their sexual attractiveness while categorically rejecting marriage and sex and relationships of any kind with the opposite sex is irrational. It is even more obvious that a person who seeks to maximize their sexual attractiveness at the actual expense of their ability to marry, have sex with, and/or relate to the opposite sex is even more irrational. And it is blindingly obvious that a person who seeks to maximize their sexual attractiveness in preference to marrying, having sex with, or relating in any way to the opposite sex is absolutely and totally insane.
This is a straightforward example; but one that leads us nicely to a rather crucial point about ethical transcendence in human life.
Put simply, when we recognize that some goods transcend other goods, we nevertheless are still left with the question of just how or even if lower goods lead to higher goods, or in other words how means can actually function as means for ends. Given that eating is a means for a healthy, fulfilled life, the question remains how it leads to a happy fulfilled life, and therefore what method or mode of the means can serve as the most effective means for achieving the end.
It is here, however, that perhaps the most fundamental chasm emerges between the ancient and Medieval and modern worldviews as a whole, or more precisely between the normal human and contemporary American ways of life.
Since I was a small child, I have been very frequently surprised and puzzled by the attitudes taken by many people, including quite normal people, towards their activities and hobbies and goals and ends. These people were not obviously insane; they were in many cases better people than I. Nevertheless, they all assumed, as a matter of course, that the best way to achieve higher goods was by maximizing lower goods in quantity and degree. The best way to make food a means to a happy and fulfilled life was to eat the most complex and elaborate meals possible; the best way to have fun playing neighborhood baseball was to try as hard as possible; the best way to form positive relationships with the opposite sex was to be as physically strong as possible.
Now this is in fact the precise opposite of the assumption made by virtually every ancient and Medieval and Christian thinker I have ever come across; and that, I think, is really very interesting. Ancient and Medieval people universally and pervasively assume that the best way to achieve higher goods was not by maximizing lower goods, but by limiting or moderating them.
When modern people encounter pre-modern discourses on how to moderate or limit lesser goods or means, they tend to react with stark staring comprehension; usually followed by angry noises about the sad life-denying negative asceticism of monkish superstition and/or gnosticism and/or ignorance.
Yet monkish asceticism or life-denying negativity is not at all the right lens through which to view this basic assumption universal in nearly all the past to nearly everyone--far from it. Nor, it should be added, is the reason why modern people find these discourses hard to understand that they are all indolent hedonistic gluttons. The disagreement, such as it is, is not really about ends, but entirely about means; or rather, about the right way of fitting the latter to former.
When ancient and Medieval people talked about moderating or limiting lower goods, they did so because it seemed merely obvious to them that this was in fact the only way that one could conceivably direct lower goods toward higher goods and means to ends. They assumed, in other words, that one directed means towards ends, not by means of maximization, but by means of proportion. Put simply, the assumption was that there was a proper, moderate, limited degree of lower goods that would naturally lead to the achieving of higher goods, and that there was a proper, moderate, limited number of means that would serve to actually achieve the end.
Even this point is easily misunderstood by moderns, like high school students who read about Aristotle's Golden Mean and assume that this is a literal or mathematical mean, that it means that one should be always and everywhere 50% angry and 50% not angry, or even that the goal of ancient philosophy was to not be too just or good or wise or knowledgeable or happy. This is false; Aristotle's philosophy, and indeed nearly all ancient and Medieval philosophy, is entirely structured by transcendence, by the goal of achieving ultimate knowledge and wisdom and goodness and happiness through the contemplation and imitation of of God.
The point of limiting physical pleasures, believe it or not, is not to have less pleasure, but in a sense to have more; or more precisely, to have physical pleasures and at the same time achieve the transcendent end of physical pleasures, to have the lower good that is a means and at the same time the higher good that is the end.
Again, this assumption taken in the abstract is so contrary to modern understanding that even my explanation here is likely to be met with confusion: it nevertheless, I would argue, is quite straightforwardly common sense when applied to the actual realities of human life.
Eating as much food as possible is not obviously the best way to achieve the transcendent ends of food; any more than drinking as much alcohol as possible is obviously the best way to achieve the transcendent ends of alcohol. If our goal in eating food is to enjoy life and be healthy, then it is simply obvious that the best way to do this is to eat food in moderation; just as if our goal is to enjoy socializing with others then it is simply obvious that getting black-out drunk, cursing out all our friends, vomiting our guts out in the back of a cab, and remembering nothing the next day is not the best method. If my goal is to get to China, there is a certain number of steps that will get me there; too many steps will take me to Japan, not enough steps will leave me somewhere in the Balkans, and no amount of steps in a circle will get me anywhere.
This is, as I said, just common sense; and as such not even that helpful taken on its own terms. If ancient and Medieval people assumed that the best way to treat lower goods or means was to find a proper proportion in them, this does not, in and of itself, tell us what that proportion is, or how we find it. The knowledge that I must find a moderate proportion in eating does not tell me in and of itself what or how much I should eat, let alone whether I should eat that brownie that the old woman with green skin is offering me; the knowledge that I must find a moderate proportion in drinking alcohol does not in and of itself tell me whether I should have one beer or two or ten.
Indeed, the prudentialist structure of Catholic ethics says quite emphatically that there is in fact no way to determine in advance or in the abstract what the proper proportion of lower goods to higher is in every situation and for every person. The question of how much alcohol I should drink is, ultimately, a question about my own tolerance for alcohol and my own social proclivities and my own vices and my own weaknesses and my own social surroundings and my own goals. And the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to every situation of ethical transcendence in human life.
This is, for me and most people in human history, simply common sense; for whatever reason, though, it is not a common sense that is particularly common in America in the 2020s. Again and again, and increasingly throughout my lifetime, I have been confronted by people--people of every sort, young and old, rich and poor, Evangelical and secular and Catholic--who have told me, with the simplicity and confusion that one only uses in expressing what is for them a truism, that the best and indeed only way to order means to ends is to maximize the former.
I remember vividly a conversation I once had with an acquaintance about his dedication to working out--a proclivity that had led to him becoming what the kids would call "swole," or more colloquially simply swollen, to a degree that was to my mind rather grotesque. I did not tell him this--I am more polite than that--but rather he told me that the reason he worked out like this was simply to maximize his strength; because, he said patiently, obviously it is always and everywhere better for a man to be stronger rather than less strong.
To this point I mildly objected, pointing out that the ethical question of how strong a man should be would seem to depend on the goals or ends of strength as such, the man in question, and men in general; that a man should be physically strong enough to do the physical things he needed to achieve his higher human goals or functions, such as protecting and caring for his family or serving God, but not so strong as to detract from those higher goals or functions. To this, he responded with stark staring incomprehension, simply insisting, with that same truistic single-mindedness, that a stronger man was always better and manlier than a less strong man. And to this I had no response: though still, somewhere in my mind, is an image of an utterly grotesque, swollen monstrosity being crowned the best of men in preference to saints and sages and Christ himself.
Anyway, I had no idea at the time that I was speaking to a forerunner of what the Internet tells me is an entire ecosystem of maxxers--people who believe that the best way to achieve transcendence and meaning and ultimate happiness is to maximize a single unimportant trait or an obviously lower good. Some people looksmaxx, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, while others proteinmaxx, sleepmaxx, gymmaxx, auramaxx, and/or moneymaxx. Obviously, none of this is real--but just as obviously, it expresses something real, if only the inchoate assumption I have seen my whole life in virtually everyone.
Most obviously, this is an assumption that has defined from its beginnings what we now call nerd culture; a culture that measured and measures a person's worth precisely by their maximizing of utterly trivial knowledge and utterly useless technical skill. It has just as obviously defined gaming culture; a culture that long ago normalized taking trivial means of amusement and dedicating absurd amounts of energy and intellect to mastering them, staying up for days on end chugging energy drinks and working out mathematical charts to grind gear and optimize skill points and attributes and find exploits and beat games and levels as fast as possible. Less obviously, it has defined for a while now our entire economic system; a system that has long since based itself on the idea that money was value and that the more money someone had the more value they had and which recently crowned a miserable self-hating twitter-addicted divorced Dad with no social skills as the first trillionaire and the most valuable person in the history of the human race.
Perhaps most consequentially, the same base assumption has come to define our entire political system, which in 2026 is based more than ever before on the infinite maximization of procedural means and the lesser goods of entertainment at the expense of higher goods and unity and peace and justice and the common good and human life itself. Donald Trump is certainly not the best President we have had for achieving the ends of politics, prosperity or peace or justice or human flourishing: he is, however, I think, after many years of sober reflection, probably in fact the most entertaining ruler of any kind in all of human history. And that is not nothing!
I still, to an extent, enjoy watching and listening to Donald Trump; and I always have. This recognition simply never seemed to me to offer any reason whatsoever to vote for him or support him as a political candidate for office. And if even his entertainmentmaxxing has grown to me less entertaining over time, it is simply because, even considered as entertainment, it has grown harder to enjoy as the violations of the ends of politics have proliferated. After all, the sober truth is that when means are abused, when they are treated as ends in themselves in preference to their own intrinsic purposes, they destroy not just higher goods, but themselves. The looksmaxxer is not even attractive; and Donald Trump is in grave danger of no longer being funny.
Maxxing as Consolation in the Age of Despair
Still, after all these years, I confess that I don't entirely get it. As a sinner, I can understand from experience how a person in certain circumstances and under certain conditions of intense fear or desire hopes to achieve transcendence by maximizing lesser goods; I can, more cogently, understand how limited and regulated degrees of excess have served as cultural or ritual symbols and therefore means of transcendence. Excess, after all, is said in many ways; and regulated symbolic excess for the purpose of achieving higher ends such as cultural unity or worship of the divine is one of the most human things there is--and hence in no way in itself a violation of the order of means to ends.
I understand, I think, all this. I do not understand how anyone living in the real world or remotely familiar with human life could genuinely think think that the best way to gain an end is through the maximization of means. Nor can I account intellectually for the utter dominance this belief seems to have achieved in modern American life.
As the broken record that I am, I could argue that all this has something to do with the modern obsession with immanentized divinities, with the self-contradictory self-deception that lesser goods and means are actually transcendent, overriding ends in themselves. I could even tediously and repetitively argue that it has something to do with the American cult of heroes, or nomadism as a religion defined by belief in a divine charismatic license to conquer and kill and pile up commodities without limit.
There is, I think, truth in both of those explanations; yet neither explanation is complete, at least at the level of actual human persons.
My suspicion is that at the root of this viewpoint, both individually and collectively, or at least of its growing prevalence in American society, is simple despair: despair of the possibility of actually achieving transcendent ends of whatever sort.
It is because people despair of actually relating to or marrying the opposite sex that they looksmaxx in a purely self-referential way; it is because people despair of actually achieving the ends of politics, justice and prosperity and peace, that they vote for the funny reality TV star. If you cannot achieve the end, you can at least get more of the means; or, more perversely, deceive oneself into thinking that you have achieved the end when you actually have not. If Donald Trump is entertaining, then he might as well be a good President; if I am hot, I might as well be loved. At the worst, a kind of reversal takes place whereby the end becomes an actual means to its own means: I get married so people will think I am hot; I engage in politics so that I will be entertained.
If this is the truth, then the only way to overcome our cultural obsession with maximizing means at the expense of ends is to demonstrate to people, contra their own despair, that it is in fact possible to moderate means and so achieve ends: that it is in fact possible to do politics, to marry, to get to China, to eat and drink in moderation and enjoy it, to slay the dragon and rescue the princess.
It is not necessarily the case that achieving any of these ends is easy; or that we will succeed in achieving them if we try.
It sure beats the alternative, though.
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