Everyone Optimised. Now Everything Looks the Same.

Eugene Healey opens his latest essay with a man hitting himself in the face with a hammer to sharpen his jawline. It is a grim image. It is also a marketing story, though not the flattering one the wellness industry likes to tell about itself.

His argument, briefly, is this. The old ladders of mobility have been sawn off. A degree that guarantees nothing, a housing market that takes twice as long to buy into as it did thirty years ago, junior jobs quietly absorbed by AI before the graduate reaches the interview. When every external route is closed, capital does what capital always does and looks for a new frontier. It finds the body. Healey reaches for Baudrillard, who saw it coming: once the external world of things is exhausted, the self becomes the unexplored market. Looksmaxxing, the $40 billion self-improvement industry, Bryan Johnson buying his way backwards through time. The body as the last asset a person feels they actually own.

The redirection is the product

The line worth stealing for anyone who works in brand is Healey's point about redirection. Real grievance goes in, individual optimisation comes out. Instead of asking why the conditions are so bleak, young men are sold a five-dollar hammer and the promise of sovereignty. The discontent is genuine. The redirection is the thing being sold.

That mechanism is not unique to the manosphere. It is the engine under a decade of the most effective marketing we have seen. Wellness, self-care, optimisation and self-love became the dominant commercial frameworks precisely because they convert anxiety into aspiration and sell it back at a margin. You are not stressed and underpaid, you are unoptimised. There is a protocol for that, and a merch store. It is a brilliant trick, and like most brilliant tricks it works right up until the bill arrives.

Sameness is the bill

Here is the bill. When everyone optimises toward the same algorithmically distributed ideal, everyone converges. Healey names it directly: the standardisation of the human face as a market instrument. Kyle Chayka has written about airspace, the way a cafe in Bogota and a cafe in Hanoi now carry the same flat white and the same studied collection of objects. We have all watched the Instagram Face arrive, the same features produced by the same filters and the same procedures. Optimisation does not produce excellence. At scale, it produces sameness.

And sameness is commercially fatal. Walk any direct-to-consumer category right now and count the identical serif logos, the same muted palette, the same founder paragraph about a problem they could not find a clean solution for. Each one optimised against the same template, each one indistinguishable from the next, each one one funding round away from being replaced by a cheaper version of the same thing. A market that all looks alike is a market with no moat.

This is the part that should worry marketers rather than excite them. Optimisation is seductive because it is measurable. You can A/B your way to a sharper landing page the way you can hammer your way to a sharper jaw. But the most optimised version of a shared ideal is still the shared ideal, and the shared ideal is, by definition, the thing your competitor is also building. You cannot optimise your way to being different. Difference is a decision, not a metric.

The brands that survive the next few years will not be the ones with the cleanest execution of the category template. They will be the ones with an actual point of view, a position someone could disagree with, a reason to choose them that is not simply that they showed up sharpest in the queue. A brand with a real opinion can be copied slowly. A brand that only optimises the template can be replaced overnight.

Healey is making a political argument about young men, and it is a good one. The marketing version is smaller but no less true. Optimisation gets you to the front of the queue. It cannot tell anyone why you. And in a market where everyone has been optimised into looking the same, why you is the only question left that pays.

Sparked by Eugene Healey's essay The Body Is the Final Frontier of Capital, in his newsletter Considered Chaos.