Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s newsletter on making everyday life vivid.You have, by now, probably come across the notion of maxxing—looks-maxxing, sleep-maxxing, protein-maxxing, potassium-maxxing, sun-maxxing, testosterone-maxxing. Etymologically speaking, maxxing seems to be a descendant of somewhat recent slang—for those of us who remember the late 20th century, “maxin’ and relaxin’ ” and “to the max” both come to mind—but in practice, maxxing is a reductionist worldview cloaked in expansionist language.The term is often invoked to describe a narrowly focused goal: If you’re maxxing, you’re likely trying to make yourself smaller, sharper, more chiseled. Maxxing requires sacrifice. It requires careful measurement. And in this way, maxxing is a consequence of our broader optimization-obsessed culture, a fixation fueled by every product, device, app, and service that trains people to collect and analyze data generated by their own behavior.This culture of optimization has been building for some time now, since at least the 19th century, when industrialism made efficiency a core ideal of working life. Later, when offices overtook factories as the emblem of work, efficiency became more abstract. Productivity began to be measured not only in profits maximized, but also in meetings shortened, messages answered, and bottlenecks removed. Over time, workers started managing themselves preemptively in accordance with the mandate of efficiency, optimizing their own calendars and lunch breaks. This optimization mindset leaked out of business and into everything else. People stopped asking what activities were for and started asking how to do them better, faster, or more completely.[Ian Bogost: People are thinking about looksmaxxing all wrong]Efficiency now infuses every aspect of contemporary life, if you let it. Instacart and DoorDash can replace grocery shopping and dining out. People optimize their vacations, maximizing credit-card points and airport-lounge strategies. Kindle streaks and Goodreads goals have turned books into items on a checklist. Wearables have turned exercise into VO₂ or HRV maximization. The more nutrition-obsessed among us have transformed eating into macronutrient acquisition. Every pleasure can become instrumental—with every instrument focused on the outcomes it might produce.Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now. When goals overtake experience, you lose the freedom to encounter your life as it happens. And when you lose that ability, you are no longer living in full. We used to optimize work so we could do everything else. Now we optimize life as though living were another job. Too many of us seem to be maxxing our way out of the experiences and perspectives that give us maximum meaning.I’ve come to believe that wonder, the most immense of our sensations, is the antidote. Wonder can rise up anywhere. It might arrive after you hike to Hopi Point, nearly a mile above the Grand Canyon’s river floor. Or as you take in the northern lights from Tromsø, Norway. Or, on a different scale, wonder might be expected while you hold your newborn child for the first time, recognizing human life in its primal form and knowing that your own has now changed entirely. For children themselves, wonder remains abundant—in the bigness of a Tyrannosaurus rex in a museum, or the flicker of fireflies in the summer dusk. But for many adults, wonder is too often compartmentalized: a feeling we associate with extraordinary and rare experiences, banished to a realm outside the mundanities of daily life.[The Wonder Reader: A weekly guide to Atlantic stories that will fascinate and delight]For me, several aspects of modern life have made wonder seem out of reach lately: the rise of “frictionless” automated services for chores; the decline of serendipity in a world where every trip is Google Mapped; the ease with which everything can be done remotely, averting the happenstances and textures of regular routines; the ability to opt out of ambient noise (and impromptu conversations) by popping in AirPods; and, of course, our tendency to fill the gaps in our days by staring at our phones. But most of all, wonder feels scarce because contemporary life has depleted the value of the moment. Time has become instrumentalized, and as a result we have taught ourselves to treat the present primarily as a waiting room in which to plan for—and, yes, optimize—the future.Efficiency culture has muscled out the present so completely that it feels difficult to occupy a moment at all, let alone fully. Even the seasons, which help us mark the present amid the endless passage of time, seem to be anxious to overcome one another—pumpkin-spice creamers and “Pumking” imperial pumpkin ales now appear in supermarkets in July. Wonder interrupts that impulse to rush to the future before it arrives. It makes the world stop serving our self-centered plans or intentions, and instead offer something worth encountering for its own sake.For years, I have struggled with the problem myself. The urge to optimize caused me to flee to the future constantly. I realized that I felt best able to overcome efficiency culture when I treated supposedly unimportant sensations, objects, and events as vital ones instead: sliding my feet into the plush softness of slippers in the morning, feeling the warmth of a mug of coffee in my hands, hearing the gravel crunch under my feet as I walked. None of these acts compromised purpose or plans. All they required of me was to construe what I was already doing as valuable.[Atlantic Reads: The Small Stuff with Ian Bogost]Eventually I came to recognize that my long-standing obsession with ordinary things—including many that I have written about in The Atlantic, among them toasters, gas-station signs, backpacks, slushies, and gearshifts—offered a reason to take the present seriously. These objects show that beauty and even genius are often expressed through design choices and simple engineering. Tools we might think of as “useful” are in fact wondrous. The A BIT MORE button on modern toasters is a perfect example: so useful that you might overlook it as obvious, yet absolutely transformative in the making of toast. For some readers, this may generate an eye roll. Cynicism is pervasive, and not everyone has time for or interest in the scenic route. But I believe there are more of us wonder-seekers than the cynics and maxxers among us might like to admit. And besides: The route I am suggesting does not require an out-of-the-way trip. It simply asks you to accept gifts that the universe is already handing you.Wonder may not improve your résumé, make you hotter, or maximize your income. It will simply remind you that you are a body alive in the world, right now, and that is a better place to begin than most self-help advice would have you believe.Once you allow wonder to arrive, it proves to be astonishingly promiscuous. Over the past year, I’ve made a point of asking people about what inspires daily wonder. I expected themes to emerge, but I also assumed that those themes would be predictable: sunsets and forests; notable structures or works of art.Many people did describe the familiar icons of awe—the moment when an airplane breaks through the clouds, and all you can see is the great expanse of sky ahead; the experience of strangers gathering silently along a shoreline to watch the sun vanish below the horizon. But just as many have told me that they’ve found wonder in the mundane—watching a procession of ants carrying things they value, for instance. I’ve corresponded with people who described their affection for an old refrigerator; a sewing machine whose hums and clicks became a friend’s familiar voice; pots and pans that carried decades of family meals; and even a toilet whose owner began to admire it after a repair revealed its elegant method of operation.Whenever you cease treating the world as scenery or equipment, you’ll find that you encounter the world as something inexhaustibly, constantly present. Oceans and ants, sewing machines and sunsets, strangers and screen doors, microwaves and mountains, rocks and racquets, lamps and laughter all prove equally worthy. Our expectations for wonder sometimes wane, but it is with us all along, waiting to be rediscovered.This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life.”