Ian Bogost traces "maxxing"—the obsessive optimization of every aspect of life from sleep to protein intake—back to 19th-century industrialism's efficiency mandate. What started in factories and offices has leaked into everything: people now measure their vacations by credit-card points, their reading by Goodreads goals, and their exercise by VO₂ metrics. The problem runs deeper than just productivity culture. When you optimize every activity, you stop asking what things are *for* and start asking how to do them faster or better. Time becomes instrumentalized—the present gets treated as a waiting room for the future rather than as something worth experiencing. You lose the ability to encounter your life as it actually happens. Wonder, Bogost argues, is the antidote. Not the rare, compartmentalized kind reserved for Grand Canyon vistas and Northern Lights, but the everyday kind available right now. Modern friction-free services—Google Maps, DoorDash, AirPods—have erased the serendipity and ambient textures that used to interrupt our optimization impulses. Bogost realized he felt best when he treated mundane sensations as vital: the softness of slippers, warmth from a coffee mug, gravel crunching underfoot. His long obsession with ordinary objects—toasters, gas-station signs, backpacks—taught him that genius lives in simple design choices. The A BIT MORE button on a toaster is useful enough to seem obvious, yet absolutely transformative. When Bogost asked people what inspires daily wonder, he expected sunsets and forests. Instead, people described affection for old refrigerators, sewing machines whose hums became familiar voices, pots carrying decades of family meals, even a toilet whose elegant mechanism revealed itself during repair. Wonder isn't scarce—it's promiscuous and everywhere. The route requires no out-of-the-way trip. It simply asks you to stop treating the world as scenery or equipment and recognize that you're a body alive in it, right now. That's a better starting point than most self-help advice offers.