More Than a Body to Optimize: What 'Humanmaxxing' Gets Right and Misses

The upgrade temptation

A recent New York Times opinion piece profiles Christian Angermayer, a biotech billionaire whose ambitions extend well beyond ordinary wellness. His vision, dubbed 'humanmaxxing,' encompasses pharmaceutical sleep optimization, hormone manipulation for better sex, psychedelic-assisted cognition, and aggressive anti-aging interventions. The goal, broadly stated, is to rebuild the human body and blow the human mind into something sharper, stronger, and more pleasurable than nature left it.

The impulse is worth taking seriously before evaluating it. Something genuinely human is alive in this project: the refusal to accept suffering passively, the hunger for vitality, the conviction that the body matters and deserves care. These instincts are good ones. The question is whether 'humanmaxxing' is the right framework for honoring them, or whether it is a sophisticated repackaging of an old philosophical trap.

The body as project vs. the body as gift

The deepest issue with the humanmaxxing movement is not its ambition but its operating metaphor. When the body becomes a project, a set of performance metrics to be optimized, something subtle shifts in how a person relates to themselves. The body moves from gift to raw material, from given to configurable.

The Catholic intellectual tradition has long insisted on the unity of the person: the human being is a body-soul composite, not a soul operating a biological machine. Psychologically, this means that the way we relate to our bodies shapes the way we relate to ourselves. When the body becomes a platform for endless optimization, the self becomes a perpetual renovation project, and renovation projects are never finished.

Research in self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) consistently finds that extrinsic goals, including appearance, performance metrics, and social comparison, correlate with diminished wellbeing over time, even when those goals are achieved. The satisfaction from hitting a biomarker target tends to be brief; the appetite for the next target tends to grow. This is not a modern discovery. Karl Popper, reflecting on the utilitarian tradition, argued that pursuing the maximization of happiness is both impossible and, in its relentlessness, dangerous.[^1] Humanmaxxing, as Angermayer envisions it, constructs a more technologically elaborate version of exactly this trap: the pot at the end of the rainbow that, no matter how close you seem to get, remains illusory.

What the body is actually for

The Catholic tradition offers a different starting point: the body is good because it is created, not because it performs. Human dignity precedes capacity. A person with degenerative illness, limited cognition, or an aging body retains full and undiminished worth, because that worth was never contingent on biological output in the first place.

Temperance, one of the classical cardinal virtues, is easily misread as mere restraint, a killjoy principle holding back human flourishing. Its actual content is more interesting: it is the virtue of right relationship with pleasure and bodily goods. Temperance does not prohibit the pursuit of health, rest, or vitality. It asks that the pursuit be ordered, oriented toward genuine human flourishing rather than compulsive optimization. The question temperance poses to humanmaxxing is direct: What is all this for?

The ethics of cognitive manipulation

Beyond the philosophical question lies a moral one about the methods themselves. When the goal is optimizing experience, smoothing sleep architecture with pharmaceuticals, amplifying cognition with psychedelics, engineering hormonal states for better pleasure, a serious question arises about the relationship between intervention and integrity. Is chemically reconfiguring one's mental states an act of stewardship over the body one has been given, or a form of self-mutilation, however enhancing? The Catholic tradition does not treat the body as inviolable against all modification, since medicine is legitimate stewardship, but it does insist that the body's natural functioning has a given meaning that deserves respect before it is overridden. Prudence, as the virtue of right practical reasoning, demands the question be asked honestly: what is being gained, what is being lost, and who decided the original state was insufficient?

There is also what the humanmaxxing project implicitly communicates about ordinary human experience. If the goal is maximum cognitive performance, minimum aging, and peak sexual function, then the lives of the elderly, the chronically ill, and the cognitively limited are framed, however unintentionally, as suboptimal. A framework for human flourishing that generates that implication has something important to reconsider.

The alternative is richer, not poorer

The Catholic vision of the human person does not demand passivity toward the body. Medicine, sleep hygiene, nutrition, and physical care are all legitimate expressions of stewardship, of taking seriously the body one has been given. The distinction lies in the posture: care versus control, gratitude versus optimization, presence versus performance.

Hope, in the theological sense, is not optimism about biomarkers. It is the confidence that the human story has a direction and a destination that no amount of biological enhancement can provide, and that limitation, aging, and mortality are not obstacles to meaning but, rightly received, occasions for it.

Three reorientations follow from this:

Evaluate the goal before the method. Before adopting any wellness or enhancement protocol, ask what it is actually in service of. Sleep that enables genuine presence with family, work, or prayer is ordered toward something real. Sleep optimized for competitive productivity is a different goal, with different long-term effects on a person's interior life.

Resist the comparison frame. Humanmaxxing is partly driven by social comparison, the implicit benchmark of what a maximally performing human looks like. Deliberately cultivating gratitude for the body one has, rather than auditing its deficiencies, is not resignation. It is a form of accurate perception.

Hold the body with care, not contempt or compulsion. The body is good, created, meaningful, and worthy of real attention. That attention is best expressed as stewardship rather than engineering.

A person, not a platform

Christian Angermayer is asking real questions about the body, and the ambition behind humanmaxxing reflects a genuine human hunger for vitality and meaning. The Catholic tradition affirms that hunger. It simply proposes that vitality and meaning are not primarily biological achievements. They are relational and moral ones, rooted in a dignity that was given, not earned, and that no algorithm of optimization can improve upon.

References

[^1]: Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Notes to Volume II (1945): 'I believe that it is not only impossible but very dangerous to attempt to maximize the pleasure or the happiness of the people.'