The Hood Showed Me The Dark Truth Behind Looksmaxxing

The looksmaxxing community is more than just a bunch of guys who have decided to take fashion and grooming seriously. It’s something worse, and it’s a sign, not only of how bad things are, but much worse they’re going to get.

I know that because I’ve seen this movie before, only it wasn’t a bunch of young guys on the internet doing 60-hour fasts and meth to stay thin, shooting anabolic steroids, and hitting themselves in the face with hammers to reshape their facial structure.

It was guys in the ghetto who only cared who had the freshest fit, the sharpest haircut, and “got the most bitches.”

Growing up in the hood, I saw a strange attitude toward fashion and appearances. Kids in the projects made fun of each other more for looking poor than for actually being poor.

Yeah, you could get into a fight for pointing out that someone’s mama was a crackhead, but you might get jumped for talking shit on someone’s shoes or telling people they shop at Goodwill.

This ghetto mentality never made sense to me, and I talked about it in my essay about being hood rich and in my book Hard Lessons From The Hurt business.

We’re all poor as hell, and you get offended that other people think you bought your clothes second-hand from the thrift store? There are many reasons poor people can’t stop being poor, but this is a big one.

Watch/listen here

The Problem With Focusing On Just Look

Now. I’m not going to lie and say that it wouldn’t have been nice to wear pants that went all the way past my ankles or shoes where the soles weren’t flapping, but I also didn’t care about rocking a pair of Jordans and a FUBU outfit (shoutout if you’re old enough to remember FUBU).

I never understood the hood’s obsession with fashion when we were forced to live in subsidized housing with other poor folks.

That is, until I learned about the Universe 25 experiment. When I learned about those experiments, I realized that a certain type of behavior becomes prominent at the bottom of society, and that it is concerning for two reasons.

First, when a group starts to value appearances over substance, it becomes a downward cycle.

Western society has its problems, but in most Western societies, there is social mobility. Though the difficulty of pulling off a rags-to-riches story varies from country to country, we generally take it for granted that you can leave this world in a vastly better socioeconomic bracket than you entered it.

When poor, disenfranchised people give up hope and just start focusing on how they look to the exclusion of anything else, they tend to do things that keep them at the bottom.

I’ve often thought about how lucky I was that girls didn’t think I was cute, and that I looked every bit as poor as I was, because that meant my chances of getting a girl pregnant were nil. It also meant that dudes who focused on looking good didn’t want to be friends with me either.

The second reason this behavior—this looksmaxxing—is concerning is that it’s now happening at a much larger scale and affecting all levels of society. Not just the bottoms.

Dudes have always tried to look presentable, but I’m from the generation of men who thought caring about fashion was either something you only did if you were gay or really into fashion, so from their perspective, gay.

I thought it was normal for dudes to be so obsessed with their appearances until I got to an upper-middle-class school across town, where no one really did this at all.

Teenage guys from this school—most of whom were not rich by any means—were not only not interested in dressing to impress, but a lot of them prided themselves on finding deals at Goodwill, dressing in t-shirts with logos, or sports jerseys.

Yes, there is an element of caring about fashion here, but it’s not the same way as what I knew from back in the hood.

Here, guys were dressing to express a part of their personality. In the projects, guys were dressing to impress other people. Both groups would stay away from someone who looked like they had been wearing the same outfit for a year without showering, but, other than that, the motivation and attitudes towards outward appearances couldn’t be more different.

It was two different worlds. Those who didn’t live in the projects and had the means to spend money trying to look fly didn’t, and those who couldn’t afford three meals a day or pay the full price rent would go broke trying to show off.

Enter Universe 25.

Universe 25 And The Beautiful Ones

In the 1960s and 70s, researcher John Calhoun built a paradise for mice.

He created an enclosed world called Universe 25.

The food and water were unlimited. There were no predators and plenty of space. All diseases were controlled, and the mice had all the shelter they needed. This was about as close to utopia as you could get.

Then something happened.

With everything they needed, all they did was bang and have babies. Over and over again, until they were overcrowded. And all hell broke loose.

As the colony grew and social interactions became increasingly chaotic, normal behavior began to break down. Some males became hyper-aggressive, attacking females and younger mice. Mothers began neglecting or abandoning their offspring. In some parts of the enclosure, infant mortality reached horrifying levels.

This was despite Calhoun keeping unlimited food, water, and healthcare available to the mice.

Some withdrew completely. Instead of fighting, mating, or participating in mouse society, they simply checked out. But one group of mice stood out.

Calhoun called them The Beautiful Ones.

These mice didn’t fight. Didn’t compete. Didn’t court. Didn’t contribute.

They spent their time eating, sleeping, and obsessively grooming themselves. They looked perfect, but they had checked out of the game entirely. They neither fought nor the other f-word.

This is similar to the behavior I saw in the hood, and I believe this is what’s driving the looksmaxxing trend today.

The Hidden Abundance In The Hood Makes It Like Universe 25

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you should be ready to argue with me in the comments—but before you do, hear me out.

First, people are not mice.

We’re a bit more complex, so instead of just looking fly for the sake of looking fly, humans actually try to have sex.

Whether that’s with members of the opposite sex or not is beyond the purposes of this video, but I want to make it clear that we’re comparing one aspect of behavior rather than the entire spectrum.

The other thing that might jump out to you is how, in the Universe 25 mouse utopia that turned into mouse hell, all of the mice continue to receive unlimited resources and shelter.

To the non-ghetto initiated, you’re probably scratching your head because one of the hallmarks of the hood is a lack of resources. I’ve certainly known my share of people who ran out of food a week or two before the food stamps (that’s EBT for anyone born in a year that starts with the number two) were re-upped.

However, in the projects, most people are existing on government subsidies, which, in effect, create unlimited resources. At the very least, public assistance and subsidized housing guarantee that you’ll get something.

Even when that’s not enough—and it often isn’t—there is free school, summer lunch programs, and the food bank. I know that my mom took advantage of all of these things, and most of the time we had enough, but there were rough patches.

But unlimited resources, by themselves, don’t create looksmaxxing “beautiful ones” who just focus on preening themselves. The situation in Mouse Hell, as I’ll call it from now on, also robbed the mice of any purpose.

Since all the resources were plentiful, there was nothing to give the mice any meaning in life. Well, as much meaning as a mouse could possibly have. But what little purpose in life that a mouse might have was eliminated in Universe 25. You probably see where this is going.

For many reasons, the opportunities for a better life for people living in the hood are scant—and that’s putting it mildly.

Being poor and living in the hood fosters a sense of hopelessness that you are reminded of every time you look outside, hear a gunshot, or open your refrigerator.

That hopelessness makes it harder to take action to change your environment, so you eventually start playing status games at your level rather than trying to improve it.

Status Is Out of Reach, So Let’s Just Be Beautiful

Traditional pathways to status—career, home ownership, marriage, and upward mobility—feel less certain. And the numbers suggest this isn’t just a feeling.

Roughly 90% of Americans born in the 1940s eventually out-earned their parents. For later generations, that number has fallen to around 50%. For young men aged 22 to 27, recent labor data showed that college graduates had unemployment rates roughly similar to those of non-graduates. The old promise—go to school, work hard, get a degree, and you’ll be rewarded—doesn’t feel as guaranteed as it once did.

And the same pattern shows up elsewhere.

Around age 27, roughly 40% of Boomers owned homes. For Gen Z, it’s closer to one-third. Marriage rates have also steadily fallen across generations. Previous generations measured adulthood through stable milestones: marriage, career, a home, and kids.

Speaking of marriage and kids, this is the most interesting comparison between the mice and humans.

Gen Z has the lowest marriage and birth rates of any generation.

Now, we could argue that this is because everyone is using birth control and just hooking up like crazy, but both men and women are reporting significantly less sex in their 20s than in previous generations.

And yet, there is this growing trend of looksmaxxing.

We don’t have exact numbers for how many men are practicing looksmaxxing. Nobody is conducting national surveys asking young men whether they’re mewing in the mirror or calculating their canthal tilt. But we can see the footprints.

Cosmetic procedures among men have exploded. Worldwide, cosmetic surgeries performed on men increased by roughly 95% between 2018 and 2024, while non-surgical procedures—Botox, fillers, lasers, facial work—jumped 116%.

Men now undergo more than a million cosmetic procedures every year in the United States alone, and the global men’s grooming market has grown into a $55+ billion industry, projected to approach $80 billion by the end of the decade.

That’s what this looks like in real life, by the way.

An entire industry of men trying to improve their appearance and looksmaxx, but sex, dating, marriage, reproduction, and even socializing with women are way down. This sounds remarkably like the beautiful mice, but it gets even deeper and worse.

The face of looksmaxxing, social media influencer Clavicular, has said that—and I’m paraphrasing, so don’t shoot me if I don’t get this word-for-word—the most important, highest-leverage thing a man can do is improve his appearance.

I actually don’t disagree entirely, because let’s be honest:

Looking your best is important. People judge a book by its cover. It might not be fair, but if you want people to read the pages of a book, i.e., get to know you, it really helps if that book has an appealing cover. Or, at the very least, a cover that’s not torn, dirty, and morbidly obese.

But this is also a man who, at the age of 20, is already suffering from erectile dysfunction because of his looksmaxxing routine, which is destroying his hormones.

Clavicular is very clear that he’s not here for a long time. He’s here to look good. The way he goes about achieving his looksmaxxing goals—meth-level appetite suppression, extreme leanness, hormone experimentation, and relentless aesthetic optimization—doesn’t exactly scream, “I’m planning for retirement.”

But he’s at a point now where he can’t even enjoy the main benefit of a man looking looksmaxxing: women. And he has millions of followers and views, with men taking his advice.

This would explain why, despite the surge in men trying to looksmaxx, fewer men in their prime age range are having sex than ever before. The 2023 National Survey of Family Growth showed that for men ages 22-34, 35% hadn’t had sex in the past 3 months. And for guys who think it’s a small number of guys having all the sex, 31% of women hadn’t gotten any action in the same time frame.

The numbers bear it out: The numbers bear it out: Clavicular isn’t the only young man who gave up his sexual soul to gain admiration from women and, in doing so, wrecked his libido. Okay, maybe the guys not getting laid haven’t destroyed their hormones, but they are clearly putting more time, attention, and money into their appearances while seeing fewer benefits with women.

At least with the mice, we know they were just not interested rather than unable to perform. Then again, there is mention of whether Dr. Calhoun checked whether the mice’s equipment was working properly, so this is all speculation.

Control What You Can, Forget Everything Else

Either way, the point is that human beings don’t stop competing for status when traditional status ladders weaken. The competition just shifts to what people can control.

If becoming a homeowner feels distant, if careers feel unstable, if marriage keeps getting pushed further down the road, people start investing in status signals they can control immediately.

And one of the easiest things to control is appearance.

You can’t lower mortgage rates, force employers to hire you, or—despite doing meth on a 72-hour fast and hitting yourself in the face with a hammer—make girls like you.

But you can get lean, hit the gym, and optimize your skin.

You can spend hours learning about jawlines, facial symmetry, canthal tilt, and the perfect haircut for your face shape.

Back in the projects, looking fly was social currency. What worries me is that I’m starting to see a version of that same game spreading far outside the hood.

It’s a lot like this with money.

The very poor and the very rich are both free, each for different reasons. The poor are heavily subsidized and tend to have no expectations of self-improvement. The rich are already set.

But if you’re in the middle, you struggle.