Author Luke Burgis argues 'maxing' culture and social media are eroding individual identity — and AI may be making social contagion invisible

Luke Burgis on maxing culture, social contagion, and AI's invisible influence

Luke Burgis, author of Wanting and now The One and the 99, argues that social media and maxing culture are eroding individual identity — and that AI may be accelerating the process in ways nobody can yet measure.

Social contagion is Burgis's term for the unconscious absorption of other people's desires, beliefs, and emotions. It can run positive or negative — moving to Silicon Valley to absorb ambition is contagion working in your favor — but the concern is scale and invisibility. Social media has already made contagion harder to trace; AI may make it nearly undetectable.

His central worry is a subtle one. When ChatGPT synthesizes Tim Ferriss's ideas into personalized advice, the user feels like they're getting something tailored to them. Ferriss's name disappears. The origin disappears. But everyone asking the same question is getting a version of the same answer, drawn from the same training corpus. Burgis flags Tim Ferriss's own data point here: an 80% drop in nonfiction book sales that Ferriss traced to ChatGPT's 2022 launch. The mechanism isn't just cannibalization — it's that the advice feels personal precisely because the source has been laundered out of it. Burgis invokes Severance's Lumon-like framing, describing it as a potential "pluribus" situation where apparent personalization masks deep homogeneity.

“Social contagion is just the unconscious way that we catch the desires of other people, the ideas and beliefs and emotions of others, and we integrate them into our sense of self without really realizing that we caught these things from other people... I wonder if AI is actually contributing to contagion and mimesis in a way that we don't fully understand.”

Maxing as identity collapse

Burgis frames maxing culture — looks maxing, fitness maxing, politics maxing — as the clearest symptom of what he's describing. When someone maxes one thing, everything else atrophies. He cites the popular looks-maxing creator Clavicular, who has no legible political views because politics is simply irrelevant to his singular focus. The inverse is someone who's ideology-maxing, who can only generate opinions within their party's frame. Both represent the same failure: a pseudo-self defined entirely by external reference points rather than an internally developed identity.

Burgis is direct that this was his own pattern in his twenties — cycling through startups, maxing on each one, then burning out and starting again. His diagnosis is that maxing can't be an end in itself; it's a symptom of the absence of what he calls a "solid sense of self."

The over-identification problem

More broadly, Burgis sees Americans over-identifying with groups — political parties, online communities, cities — in ways that suggest a widespread deficit in individual identity. Groups, he argues, demand total loyalty immediately, which forecloses the slower process of actually testing whether you belong. The people he finds most intellectually compelling are those who are hardest to situate: politically unpredictable, genuinely difficult to categorize.

Leisure as a skill

The prescriptive thread, if there is one, is that ambitious founders are bad at leisure — and that this isn't a minor lifestyle issue. Burgis and his colleague Jordan Castro run the Clooney Institute, which offers humanities retreats for busy founders, with the explicit premise that genuine rest and reflection make people more effective, not less. Burgis's own analogy: he couldn't sit still on a Thai beach while building one of his companies. Learning to actually stop, he argues, has been "one of the most important innovations" in his life.

His book is The One and the 99.