Optimization Culture Is Turning Everyone Into Patrick Bateman

The video quickly blew up online for one clear reason: a lot of us on X have a finely-tuned hater instinct, especially for wanna-be flexers posting slop parading as insight. So, haters did what haters do: mocked the sigma grindset morning routine so pretentiously posted without any sense of irony by an account named Tips For Men - Fashion | Essentials | Luxury. 

Before you knew it, it snowballed into a new satirical trend. Everyone began posting their own iterations of this nonsensical, time consuming, and physics-defying morning routine for laughs.

Some of the highlights included: perpetual chugging of, dipping your face into, and even brushing your teeth with Saratoga water—some kind of bougie water bottle he’s clearly stealth advertising. 

Don’t forget to stock up on bananas to rub on your face, then hover in the air for several minutes (according to poorly coordinated timestamps of demarcating when he leaps into, enters, and exits the pool), and arrange for your faceless female servants to wait on you hand and foot throughout the day. If you follow this carefully curated morning routine, you too can sit on fake, performative business calls exchanging midwit dialogue like “looking at it bro, we got to go ahead and get at least 10,000.” Certified alpha male.

Some brave souls dared to stand up for his right to get up close and personal with his facial bananas. Most leaped at the opportunity to humble his attempts to mog the plebs online with his pointless morning routine, zeroing in on their favorite absurdities. For some, it was the staged breaking of a (competitor brand’s) glass water bottle, captured on a camera curiously already positioned on the floor, that sealed the deal. 

Or how his supposed regular practice of journaling clearly shows him writing in the very first page of a seemingly newly purchased journal. Or how he started and stopped reading in the same minute. Of course, the trend was quickly declared dead upon more mainstream accounts and brands trying to take part, like the (presumed dead, but apparently alive) Duolingo bird and MrBeast. This is post-morbidity reporting. The meme is dead. It’s over. But why did it exist in the first place?

Since Hall’s viral morning routine caught everyone’s attention through its insufferable implied superiority via six hours of performative faffing about with meaningless biohacking rituals that achieve very little, we’ve seen a pile-on of mocking imitations that delight in poking fun at Hall’s lack of self awareness. They have also inadvertently driven up the sales for the products Hall was marketing or using—bananas, Saratoga water, mouth tape, magnetic nasal strips. Shots of Van Cleef bracelets suggest potential partnerships with other brands or maybe it’s just a status signal.

Other videos following the same format sincerely, likely under the same marketing strategy and brand, began to circulate, but this content is nothing new. I’ve noticed this sort of sterile, brute optimization lifestyle content for a few years. The men who make this content can range in appearance, physicality, and niches, but they all suffer from the same sort of Patrick Bateman-ification of hustle and optimization culture.

Mackenzie William seems to be perpetually LARPing as Bateman much more explicitly. With 2.3 million followers on TikTok, he creates videos of Bateman-inspired cleaning, fitness, and meticulous organization on a pathological level. His videos go viral for their attention-grabbing neurotic fixation on precise bed-making up to luxury resort quality, meticulously steaming the sheets and fluffing the pillows so that everything is in pristine condition around the clock, despite living by himself. 

He maintains a Bateman-inspired strong and lean physique and films himself getting ready for runs with every overpriced, arbitrary gadget you can purchase. He applies face masks, his shoes are whiter than a Taylor Swift concert, and you won’t find a single crease in his sheets, a wrinkle on his face, or an activewear garment or exercise gadget he doesn’t own. For William, it’s obviously a bit. An incredibly committed, never-ending, all-consuming bit that has become his marketable brand.

His content is an homage to one of the most famous fictional yuppie serial killers in cinematic history, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. He’s acknowledged the comparison in a YouTube short. Bateman is also the face of the sigma grindset community that has jokingly idolized him as a role model. I’m not going to moralize about media literacy or why it’s incumbent that you “get” that Patrick Bateman is not supposed to be idolized. Let’s be honest, Christian Bale looks cool as hell in that movie, and it’s just a meme.

What freaks me out is the sincere rise in demand for this content and the creators who peddle deadly serious routines that intermingle hustle culture, productivity hacking, biomaxxing, and hyper-orderliness. Think the audiences of people like Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson, who live to optimize, read books like Atomic Habits, and treat their body not as a temple but as a machine to be updated.

The Bateman LARP is a good hook to build an audience online. It’s compelling enough to watch so you can hawk a course or sell some products or to just have a giggle at making people squirm. But there’s undeniable overlap between the tongue-in-cheek American Psycho-ification of William’s content and the sincerity of Hall’s content—the performative grind and metrosexual upkeep in this content ecosystem is almost indistinguishable from William’s satire. The fantasy that's compelling onscreen becomes disturbing in real life when people willingly commodify emptiness.

This content is so successful because it’s reflective of the hyper-materialist, optimization-obsessed culture we currently live in, where crisis of meaning has been replaced with pseudo-religious rituals and purification, only in the form of “wellness.” Self-mastery as performance has quietly replaced community, family, and spirituality in ways that are far more sinister than even American Psycho’s cautionary satire intended. These people aren’t psychopaths learning how to act human, they’re humans willingly yielding to algorithms. It’s an incredibly perverse inversion of Bale’s monologue, “I'm some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity—something illusory…I simply am not there.”