I feel like being an idiot with this one.
So that’s what we’re going to do.
Last week we got all analytical and longform, so going a bit off the wall is certainly in order.
(Also….I thought last week was a cook? Guess not that much? It happens.)
Anyway.
Let’s talk about….
Ascending.
I’ve been morbidly curious about the “Looksmaxxing” wave in culture over the last year.
Fascinated as can be- and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
No, we’re not going to be taking hammers to our jawlines or injecting Reta today, or any of that.
But I am borrowing a term from the terminally-online, “appearance is everything” crowd.
In short, they view ascending as anything you do to make yourself better looking.
Everything revolved around ascending.
If you’re not improving, what are you doing?
The first time I ever heard it I was like “oh, that’s brilliant”.
So bizarre it veers into genius.
Naturally, I extrapolated it into everything I was doing.
The group chat quickly adopted the lexicon, and that was that.
On a work call?
Ascending.
Helping a neighbor out?
Ascending.
Giving a friend a ride to the airport?
Ascending.
Suddenly, about midway through last week, I noticed something:
This idiotic, joking framework was actually making real, tangible life feel much better.
“Self-Discipline” Has Jumped the Shark
There was a YouTube short I saw the other day of some shirtless entrepreneur bro shouting in his home gym that he was up and working out at 3:45AM.
(How much earlier are we going to get up?!)
The usual platitudes about grinding, hustle, so on and so forth.
Then he went further:
I do this so that I’m in the right ROOMS shaking the RIGHT HANDS.
Brother.
I’ve been in more than my fair share of the “right rooms” in this life, if they caught you speaking that way, you’d get kicked out.
There’s a legion of imitations and the like over on TikTok and IG, too.
Modern self-discipline culture is suffering major, major aura loss.
If the looksmaxxing crowd spent time watching some of this content when they felt hungry, they probably wouldn’t need Reta.
There’s No Guilt When You’re Ascending
None at all.
Instead, it’s an absurd little hit of joy.
Celebrating 4-yard gains like a 50-yard touchdown.
Who cares?!
There’s no 5 step morning routine.
No “win the day” BS.
You make the hard call, do the annoying client task, help somebody out when you could have ignored them.
You cook dinner instead of copping slop from Doordash.
You get your lifts in.
Ascending. Ascending. Ascending.
So what if I borrowed a word from guys assessing each other’s orbital bones down to the millimeter.
This ridiculous nonsense works.
In all seriousness, I think I actually know why.
Which Way, 2026 Human?
Look, there’s plenty to be all worked up about this week:
Trump’s banning CNN from the White House!
Lindsay Clancy’s husband on 60 Minutes!
The Fed raised rates!
Ohtani might start the playoffs on the IL!
The Great American Outrage Industrial complex, with its ever-growing tentacles, will always happily welcome you into its cruel grasp.
Open TikTok.
Guys in red hats with political ragebait content.
Girls with Rhode peptide undereye masks affixed, applying moisturizer and ranting to the camera about men in that God awful, neo-therapyspeak where every other word some how ends in the suffix “-washing”
(I actually once tried to wrap my head around it, but figured literally anything on Earth was a better use of my time.)
It doesn’t have to be this way!
Miss me with all that.
In a world where the noise just gets louder and louder and eats up more bandwidth, sometimes we need little frameworks like these to produce big changes.
Plus it’s always fun to be a little weird.
Beats being outraged and low-vibration by orders of magnitude.
So, all that being said, we look forward to another week.
Another plate full of responsibilities.
Places to be and people to see.
You can either give in, show up next Sunday all bitter and exhausted.
Or you can show up on a whole higher plane than you were when you read this.
Choice is yours, just don’t shoot the absurd, internet-brained messenger along the way.
All love as always.
-John Abbate
9.20.2026
Keep it coming. We need a consistent hit of positivity these days, and you deliver it every week. Thank you!