After years of grueling self-improvement movements – Healthmaxxing, Sleepmaxxing, Looksmaxxing, we’ve finally reached the logical endpoint. The latest vehicle of salvation? Retardmaxxing. This new meme ideology encourages its acolytes to reject over-analysis of decision-making, advocating a course of imperfect action over perpetual hesitation. The name alone will set shivers down the spine of every 2000s era primary school teacher who campaigned to excise the word ‘retard’ from their charges’ vocabulary. Yet Retardmaxxing could be a sorely welcome ideology in a Britain hamstrung by learned helplessness and conditioned inactivity. It could even be taught in schools to shake us from this malaise in our national psyche (picture the word now, cut out in gold lettering on a primary school display board).
One coarse metric I’ve been using for its validity is the success of schoolmates who were ‘a bit of a dick’. You know the type: they had innumerable harebrained schemes, some of which failed miserably, and professed to have a worldliness uncommon to their age (yet were often a bit of a knucklehead). Lots start down the well-trodden route of selling multipacks of Lucozade on the school playground, referring to themselves as an ‘entrepreneur’ on day two of setting up shop. Many got immediately shut down; others received a local news article for their ingenuity, and a fast track to micro-celebrity on Series 23 of The Apprentice.
