We have more of almost everything. But what exactly are we getting out of it?
Chap | Notice Labs | October 28, 2026
Dictionary.com has named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
Looksmaxxing. Sleepmaxxing. Proteinmaxxing. Tokenmaxxing.
Apparently, nearly everything we do can now be pushed toward some imagined maximum.
And why not? We can measure more, improve more, produce more, and consume more than ever before.
But perhaps we've misunderstood what is actually being maxed out.
What if it isn't us? What if it's everything around us?
An Abundance of Everything
We have an extraordinary amount of information available.
We can access entire libraries without leaving our homes. Compare products from across the planet. Consult specialists, watch demonstrations, take courses, examine research, and ask artificial intelligence to explain practically anything.
What once required considerable effort can now happen in seconds.
That's remarkable.
But consider what arrives with all that access.
More products require more comparisons. More information requires more evaluation. More opinions demand more consideration. More tools introduce more things to learn, maintain, update, and occasionally swear at.
We've become rather good at making things available.
Have we become equally good at determining what's useful?
A person shopping for something as ordinary as a phone charger can encounter dozens of brands, hundreds of reviews, technical specifications, contradictory recommendations, and a fellow on YouTube who has dedicated forty-seven minutes to explaining why everyone else is wrong.
Somewhere in all that abundance is a charger.
Hopefully.
The Cost of Having Plenty
In 1971, economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon described a fundamental problem of an information-rich world: information consumes the attention of those receiving it.
And attention is limited.
That observation has become particularly relevant in a world where information isn't merely available. It's constantly being presented, recommended, refreshed, and delivered.
But we should be careful here.
Research doesn't establish that having more choices automatically makes people miserable or incapable of deciding. A 2010 review found inconsistent effects of choice overload. A later, 2015 analysis identified conditions under which additional choices are more likely to become burdensome, including greater complexity and uncertainty about personal preferences.
In other words, abundance isn't inherently the villain.
Sometimes more is exactly what we need.
More medical knowledge. More accessible education. More opportunities to work, communicate, create, and explore.
The question is what happens when the work of sorting through everything begins to outweigh the benefit of having it.
That's a different problem.
And perhaps a more useful one to investigate.
When Improvement Becomes Another Obligation
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve.
Exercise can make us stronger. Better tools can save time. Technology can expand what we're capable of accomplishing.
Artificial intelligence, for example, can help a person understand something that once seemed inaccessible.
It can also generate another hundred pages for that same person to examine.
The difference matters.
Consider how easily improvement becomes an ongoing assignment.
We can optimize our sleep, track our productivity, monitor our activity, improve our diets, refine our schedules, and evaluate nearly every moment of our day.
Even relaxation can become a performance requiring measurement.
At some point, a perfectly reasonable question presents itself:
Are we improving the experience of living, or adding more work to the experience?
That's not an argument against improvement.
It's an argument for noticing the difference.
The Missing Measurement
We measure speed, quantity, efficiency, growth, engagement, and performance.
But there's another measurement worth considering.
Does this remove more complexity from my life than it introduces?
A useful tool should help accomplish something. A useful explanation should improve understanding. A useful choice should give us something worthwhile, not merely another collection of possibilities to investigate.
This doesn't mean the simplest option is always the best.
Sometimes complicated things are worth the effort. Sometimes exploration is valuable precisely because we don't know what we'll discover.
But abundance should remain an opportunity, not become an obligation.
Having access to something doesn't mean we must consume it.
Having the ability to optimize something doesn't mean it requires optimization.
And having more doesn't mean we're necessarily getting more out of it.
Perhaps We've Maxxed the Wrong Thing
The word maxxing is wonderfully flexible. It can describe genuine ambition or make fun of our obsession with improvement.
Maybe that's why it's caught on.
But what interests us at Notice Labs isn't whether the word survives another year.
It's the condition the word helps us notice.
We live surrounded by possibilities, many of them genuinely extraordinary.
Yet every possibility asks something of us, even if that something is only a moment of attention.
And attention, unlike the things competing for it, cannot be endlessly multiplied.
Perhaps progress isn't always about adding another possibility.
Sometimes it's about recognizing which possibilities are worth carrying forward.
We don't need to stop exploring.
We might simply become more deliberate about what we bring home.
What We Noticed
Availability → Abundance → Competing demands → Divided attention → The need for judgment
That's one possible trail, not a universal rule.
An Invitation to Observe
Think about something you've recently purchased, learned, improved, or tried to accomplish.
Did having more available help you?
Or did you find yourself sorting through so much that the original purpose nearly disappeared?
We're interested in both experiences, including the ones that contradict our observations.
Bring your examples, disagreements, and unanswered questions into the conversation. We don't need to settle the subject today.
There's plenty more to notice.
And perhaps that's enough maxxing for one afternoon.
Sources and Further Exploration
Dictionary.com — 2026 Word of the Year: Maxxing
https://www.dictionary.com/articles/word-of-the-year-2026
Herbert Simon — Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971)
https://gwern.net/doc/design/1971-simon.pdf
Scheibehenne, Greifeneder & Todd — Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1086/651235
Chernev, Böckenholt & Goodman — Choice Overload: A Conceptual Review and Meta-Analysis (2015)