ONEMAXXING
By Lucas Oliver Bigandt
You might have seen the new Gen Z term maxxing. It inspired me to coin a term of my own: onemaxxing. A little silly, but that’s why it’s funny.
To me, onemaxxing is the recognition that everything you experience belongs to your own sovereign oneness. Instead of trying to control life, you step into it with curiosity and trust, allowing your own inner knowingness to reveal what comes next.
The practice is surprisingly simple. Leave your home without a rigid plan. Follow your intuition rather than your habits. Take the unexpected turn. Sense your inner knowing instead of immediately thinking your way forward. You begin discovering your own energy instead of chasing someone else’s reality.
From that naturally comes what I call winmaxxing.
Winmaxxing is the willingness to stop struggling for the biggest victories and instead collect the effortless ones that are already waiting for you.
For me, this showed up through skateboarding.
There were countless tricks I had nearly landed at different spots over the years. Yet because I wasn’t truly caring for myself, I constantly abandoned them in search of something else. Often the people I was skating with wanted to move on to another spot or do something different, and I would simply follow along. There was nothing wrong with what they wanted to do, but I rarely stopped to ask whether I was actually finished with what I wanted to do.
I simply wasn’t patient enough to allow myself to finish what I had already begun, and over time those seemingly insignificant moments became a recurring way of abandoning myself. I would leave my own experience unfinished because something outside of me appeared to have greater momentum or priority. It happened in other areas of my life as well, but skateboarding made the pattern unusually easy to see.
So one day I returned to skating without following my usual routine, which had been heavily informed by my old way of skating. Instead of heading to the same spot simply because it was familiar, I asked myself what I genuinely wanted to do.
Repeating the same location with the same mindset can easily become a form of stagnation. Progress disappears, and so does the joy. The old patterns seep in and take the place of true heart volition.
So I chose the easy wins. That’s what my heart wanted to do. It wanted those wins for me.
I revisited tricks I had nearly landed years ago. They were still there, patiently waiting. Waiting for me. Because my skating had improved a lot in the meantime, many of them came effortlessly.
Landing those forgotten tricks gave me far more satisfaction than forcing myself toward something new simply because I thought I should.
But what surprised me was that it did not really feel like I was just landing skateboard tricks.
Returning to them felt like returning to missing parts of my past and finally allowing them to be realized. They had been lying dormant as redundant layers of memory, carrying a strange weight simply because I had never given those experiences my full presence.
When I finally returned, I felt myself.
Not an improved version of myself, and not the person I thought I should become next. I felt something much more familiar than that: a part of myself that I had left behind and no longer wanted to walk away from.
Skateboarding is such a beautiful sport because, fundamentally, you only need yourself and a skateboard. Often I don’t even consider myself to be going to the skatepark. I think of it more as going outside to listen to music and have fun. It can be done entirely alone and still be a massive experience.
Often you meet people anyway, but you don’t necessarily meet people you planned to meet. You meet people simply as they are in that particular moment. There doesn’t have to be pressure to turn every encounter into a long-standing relationship or commitment. It can simply be a joyous afternoon together, and if things align, perhaps you see each other again because that is naturally what happens.
There is something liberating in that. I can be completely with other people without needing to leave myself in order to be with them.
If there were ever a practice in this, for me it would be exactly that: to walk back and allow what has been forgotten inside myself. To give it presence and feel the immense joy of letting that part of me be realized, rather than leaving it as a missing piece I never gave space to, or like a plant I never gave water.
What struck me was how much satisfaction something so apparently small could contain.
Landing an old skateboard trick gave me a kind of joy that I cannot really compare with a corporate title, a promotion, or a pat on the back for helping someone else build their dream or product. One comes from recognition outside myself. The other comes from direct intimacy with my own experience.
To me, one feels false and the other feels true.
That has become increasingly clear in the direction my life has taken. I am increasingly overjoyed to strip away the sense that I need to be recognized by the outside world through its standards, trophies, or definitions of success. I no longer feel the same attraction to proving that I am doing well according to someone else’s measurement of what a life should look like.
This also changed the way I understood progression itself. I wasn’t following what might be considered the traditional ladder of skateboard trick progression. I was simply doing my own thing in my own way, and yet a progression still emerged naturally. The difference was that it was mine. Rather than moving through a predetermined sequence of what I should learn next, my own progression developed according to what actually suited me, what interested me, and what I was ready to experience.
My trophy is being highly intimate with myself and with my own journey of self-discovery.
It is listening to as much music as I want to hear and playing as much music as I love to play. It is going into the forest simply to see the beauty of the world. It is skating because I want to feel this density one final time and experience what it is like to be completely here in a body.
None of those things need to look important from the outside. Their value is in the experience itself.
The more I allow myself to flow in that way, rather than continually seeking something outside of myself, the more I recognize the Master within myself. Not as another identity I need to build, but as something that becomes more real the less I try to become something else.
That evening after skating, I had a vivid dream.
I found myself entangled with another being that I immediately recognized as the embodiment of what Crimson Circle calls the sexual energy virus. It accused me of becoming selfish. It tried to merge with me, almost forcing itself into my soul, but it couldn’t. Before disappearing, it simply threatened to “hang up on me,” and then it was gone.
The dream made something very clear to me.
Onemaxxing, and especially winmaxxing, had become a way of moving beyond old patterns that fed on self-abandonment. The energy virus had been perfectly content while I remained someone who was always almost succeeding, making way for others to do their tricks as though mine were less important, always close to landing the trick but never actually allowing myself the completion that would naturally lead to the next level.
There had often been a sense in me that I needed to make space for everyone else first, while whatever I was doing could remain secondary. On the surface it could look considerate, but in practice I was repeatedly teaching myself that my own experience did not deserve the same space or attention. And when I continually positioned myself that way, it naturally shaped my relationships with others as well. If I treated what I wanted as secondary, there was little reason for anyone else to recognize it as a priority.
The problem wasn’t that other people were taking something from me. I was abandoning my own place before anyone had even asked me to.
That was the self-defeating proposition.
But when I returned to myself, prioritized myself, and allowed myself the win, something changed.
What has emerged instead is something I would call Radical Selfhood.
It isn’t about becoming isolated or self-absorbed. It’s about becoming deeply attentive to your own path without requiring yourself to disappear whenever somebody else’s path enters the picture. There is a profound difference between sharing an experience with others and abandoning your own experience in order to follow theirs.
Where am I in my progression specifically?
What genuinely excites me today?
Where is the next effortless step in my own progression?
Those questions are infinitely more valuable to me than asking where everyone else is skating today, which tricks happen to be fashionable, or where other people think I should be by now.
The same applies outside skateboarding.
The question is not always, “What should I accomplish next?” Sometimes it is “What within me is ready to be experienced now, what have I walked away from because I was already looking toward the next thing, and what might happen if I finally stop walking away?”
That, more than anything, is what onemaxxing has come to mean for me. It is not about maximizing the personality or becoming the most impressive version of myself. It is allowing more and more of what is mine to come home to me, whether that happens through an old skateboard trick, a piece of music, an afternoon in the forest, an encounter with another person, or a part of myself that has quietly been waiting for my presence.
Only I know where the next step is.
Or perhaps more accurately,
Only my soul does.
Dear Lucas Oliver,
Thank you very much for your article.
It resonates with me on various levels. Some of it I can not put into words. But those parts I can translate into words are about “staying confident with the impulses and desires which come from within a developing thus a sort of freedom. A freedom that makes us less dependent on the opinions of others and thereby truly enables us to develop our own unique selves. I guess, this is what sovereignty is about.
With love and blessings to you, Sabine
Lieber Lucas, vielen dank für dein Teilen.
Aha élmény volt! Köszönöm!
Lucas, thank you for your experience! That reflected me a lot my own life now and brought more clarity on the way how to live on the new side of the river. So much happy there are people who share the same experience. Thank you!