The internet personality Braden Peters, or Clavicular, has gained increasing attention over the last 6 months for being obsessed with “looksmaxxing”. His daily routine consists of growth hormone, steroids, testosterone, retatrutide, minoxidil, crystal meth, and more. He’s coined even more ridiculous terms such as bonesmashing and popularizes a handful of surgeries to disfigure and transform a variety of body parts, all for the end goal of “ascending.”
Nobody’s arguing Clavicular isn’t the most extreme case, but it’s really easy for society to overlook what he actually represents. We are leaning towards a society where attractiveness does not function as a fixed asset, but a variable that can be moved through extremely unconventional, dangerous, and harmful measures. The body in mainstream media is seen as something engineerable, but in an unconventional way compared to the past. People used to try to scale their appearance through clean eating, working out, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but now, the mundane is supplementation, surgery, and drug use.
This subculture originally developed through a misogynistic framework, where incels tried to become part of the “20%” of men they believe women to be attracted to. To up one’s physical traits supposedly gave value that determined a person’s total worth. However, it spread through social media as quick as disease, and the practice is being taken on by all types of people today. The ideology detached from its old view, but was extracted as a set of actions and behaviors that are seeping into the daily lives of mainly young male adults.
It seems that a new consumer category is being globalized, ingestibles, injectables, and hormonals are being bought for reasons beyond health, but discretionary ones. There’s always something to improve, making this an infinitely scaling market. As demand increases for these products, new technologies, no matter how detrimental for overall health, will continue to get produced.
Three years ago, GLP-1s were completely stigmatized, but today they’re discussed openly and prescribed casually. GLP-1s and Botox in your early 20s are now a common sight, and as a result, supplementation is getting more extreme. This market is being built on something fundamentally unending. The product isn’t any specific drug or supplement, but the gap between who you are and who you could be. Perfection continues to get pushed forward because looksmaxxing is a radical inadequacy.
I do believe a lot of these supplements and medicines have amazing and healthy applications, but for the right person. The problem is that they’re being abusively misused. Pharmaceutical-level interventions stripped of their original context and purpose, redeployed into something unnameable.
Now, what’s the reason behind this epidemic? It’s not a health kick, it’s all about status. Today, a symmetrical face and a six-pack signal everything — access, discipline, investment in yourself. It’s a proxy for taking yourself seriously. The aesthetic has replaced the health. The logic is that when you put time and money into your physique, your attractiveness becomes a form of power and influence.
There’s a podcast hosted by Derek Thompson called Plain English. He brought on C. Thi Nguyen for an episode where he talked about how “Metrics Make us Miserable”, and they discuss this idea about how the focus on numbers and measurement takes us astray from our values and shapes our game of life into something less enjoyable. I think this maps almost perfectly onto what’s happening to physical appearance right now. The ability to chase idealized face structures, body fat percentages, and bloodwork panels has created a hierarchy where looks are becoming evidence for moral seriousness and competence. Those that look better are rewarded for their beauty, and human worth becomes judged in this completely flawed manner. And the outcome, brutal and ironic — those that spend time trying to “fix” their appearance actually end up feeling like they’re fixing something that was inherently flawed, which is absolutely not the case. It turns out this pathology feeds the very problem it’s supposed to fix.
It’s the social media effect. We constantly expose ourselves to editing, filters, makeup artists, and algorithmically curated images on the internet, and it’s increased body dysmorphia, anxiety, and self-loathing. All you see constantly is physical perfection that is, more often than not, achieved through enhancements. Now there’s an easy way out from that feeling, splurge on drugs and do everything in your power to fill that hole in your heart. The never-ending hole.
The body is being reclassified because people are increasingly seeing the body as an optimizable asset. The physical is no longer a fixed reality, but this sanctuary that can be idealized. The use of unnatural apparatuses has made it easier than ever to transform into someone that you’ve dreamed of being, and that’s a clear sign of the decline of a self-perception that used to be built on real values, intrinsic ones. We’ve outsourced the measure of ourselves to something that can never be satisfied, and it seems like we’re all going down that path. In the end, what this culture erodes is not just our mental and physical health, but the ability to see ourselves outside the demand to become someone else.
Sources that inspired this piece:
Metrics Make us Miserable — C. Thi Nguyen on Plain English with Derek Thompson