The Incelization of the Lifeworld

A Bad Infinity

The late philosopher Jürgen Habermas had a concept called “the colonization of the lifeworld” that I’ve recently been thinking about a lot. Basically, the idea is that there’s a sphere of shared experience and relationships: family, friendships, community, customs, tradition, manners, taste—in short, a world of human value and meaning—this is the “lifeworld.” And then there is the sphere of “system,’ where society is organized by impersonal mechanisms: markets, bureaucracies, firms, states, algorithms, prices, rules, incentives. The system does not require personality or familiarity: some abstract logic, be it of money, or procedure, or administrative rules, governs it. Habermas believed that the lifeworld could become colonized—”like colonial masters coming into a tribal society,” as he put it—by the imperatives and operations of the system. So, quantitative and instrumental rationality begins to dominate all assessments of value and worth.

I believe that as a society we are now experiencing a variation of this that I call “the incelization of the lifeworld.” This is the introduction of the concepts and categories from the subcultural world of the incels into mainstream culture. I don’t think this means all young men will become homicidal misogynists or that we will stop having sex—although many think the latter is really happening. No, it’s something more subtle and insidious: the gradual sterilization of all erotic life, and its replacement with a competitive, objectifying, quasi-economic conception of intimate life.

I first learned the term “mogging”—from AMOG, alpha male of the group—from young right-wing men about a decade ago who used it more or less ironically. It originally came from the manosphere, but these were fairly normal and well-socialized people; they developed an unfortunate fascination with pathological online subcultures that came to dominate their worldview. Now less than a decade later, it’s everywhere. People use it jokingly—I do—but even with a heavy dose of irony, it structures the way people see the world.

The clearest example of incelization of the lifeworld is looksmaxxing, an idea that began in incel-adjacent forums with concepts such as “sexual market value,” numerical attractiveness rankings, “Chads,” “sub-5s,” facial ratios, canthal tilt, jaw shape and genetic ceilings. In the past few years, it has migrated massively onto TikTok and ordinary teenage culture. Clavicular is a major figure of pop culture. Young men are learning to regard features they had never previously noticed—the distance between their eyes, jaw dimensions, hairlines—as measurable defects affecting their “SMV.” Feminists will surely note with a certain irony that this is men simply going through the painful self-scrutiny and forced self-improvement that women have experienced since time immemorial, but it’s hardly a cause for celebration: women are rated even more harshly.

This is not just jargon and memes spreading from a subcultural avant-garde to the mainstream; the colonization of the lifeworld has objectively taken place in the world of dating. The experience of a competitive market of the dating app makes the incel “red pill” plausible. It is quite literally a system—an algorithm—taking over the customs and manners of mating.

Working out, dressing well, developing interests, earning money, becoming more confident, none of these are new aspirations. But manosphere culture reinscribes them as investments that should produce a determinate return in sexual attention. The gym body, salary, jawline, testosterone, height, clothes and social status become entries on a balance sheet. Nothing is pursued for intrinsic value. Even competition is no longer about virtue or excellence within a field. Does anybody aspire to be the best chess player or the best basketball player or an artist of genius anymore? These were once honorable pursuits, but now they are secondary to the rankable and quantifiable status an activity confers at large. The person is explicitly imagined as a commodity with a market valuation. And the living of life itself becomes an algorithm, a series of explicit, learnable steps to solve an optimization problem.

Suppose someone doesn’t want to go out with you. In the lifeworld, that’s an encounter between two particular people: perhaps there’s no chemistry, perhaps she likes somebody else, perhaps it’s inexplicable, perhaps you are not interesting in any way. You remind her of dad or, worse, you don’t remind her of her dad. In the incelized lifeworld, rejection gets translated into a system: I’m a 5, she’s an 8, women select men in the top 20 percent, my jawline reduced my market value, etc. A painful and ambiguous human experience has been converted into a theory of market position.

Women are adopting the same logic as part of a strategic sexual arms race: “high-value men,” “princess treatment,” “the bare minimum,” provider status, red flags, optimization and rules for extracting commitment. Relations between the sexes are strategic interactions between antagonists seeking to maximize value and avoid exploitation.

Surely, marriage, dating, and sexual conquest have always been acquisitive, competitive, and economic. We used to marry for a dowry or a herd. But now, as Habermas put it, “the ideological veils have been stripped,” and the explicitly economic comes into the foreground without the mediation of other institutions that make such calculations seem more human.

It’s always been remarkable that incels, who, along with women, suffer most from the system of competitive rationality that they describe, are the most intent on reinstantiating it and insisting that it is the natural order of things. They reject all attempts to ameliorate its effects as “cope.” Through their loneliness and alienation, they just experienced earlier and more intently the technological colonization of the lifeworld that has gradually reached everyone. But they still believe in the possibility of buying your way out: of a set of clear procedures that can allow you to proceed. They turn the experience of alienation into the absolute truth of the world.

The incel is a bit like the musician Rameau in Diderot’s famous dialogue Rameau’s Nephew. The titular nephew is a thoroughgoing cynic, who, because of his precarious and subaltern position, sees through the illusions of society and views everything as a game of extraction and exploitation. He says aloud what polite society conceals and is not fully wrong. For Hegel, Rameau’s nephew represents alienated or “self-estranged” consciousness: he sees that the official ideals of society—virtue, merit, culture—are contradicted by the actual circulation of wealth, prestige, and dependence. And he says to the Diderot figure, “I've done systematically, with a keen intelligence and a reasonable and true aim in mind, what most others do by instinct.” The incel’s truth also consists partly in giving systematic expression to assumptions that ordinary society prefers to leave unsaid. Everyone knows beauty, money, status, and popularity affect erotic success; the incel turns these tendencies into an iron system of ranks and laws. Like Rameau, he boasts that he has merely done consciously and systematically what everyone else does by instinct.

But the wretched Rameau is still able to enjoy life: “Drink good wine, gorge oneself on choice delicacies, roll around on beautiful women, lie on lovely soft beds. Other than that, the rest is nothing but vanity.” For the incel consciousness, everything is vanity except the exchange value. He is a miser. And therefore miserable. The enjoyment of erotic life recedes into infinity under the terms of the numerical system of its acquisition. That’s the nature of numbers: they go on and on. They are a bad infinity with no absolute value. Under this system, a lover cannot be one’s absolute because there is necessarily a better one. A career, a trade, an art, every experience, love itself; cells on a spreadsheet, into infinity.