Admittedly, when I first heard the term ‘rawdogging’ I am pretty sure I gasped – but once I learned what it meant, and with a flight to Canada ahead of me, I decided to try the TikTok trend.
The idea is fairly simple. You stare into the abyss.
Viral rawdogging videos sees people — mostly men — endure a long flight without indulging in any entertainment, food, water or conversation. The most entertaining option available to those who rawdog is staring at the in-flight map.
As someone who always likes a moment of reflection and enjoys meditation, I decided to try the trend out on my recent flight from London Gatwick to Quebec, Canada.
There is one important proviso to note.
For this reason – and because I’m not an ultra-committed TikTok content creator – I decided to bend the rules slightly. I would eat, drink and go to the toilet if needed and I also wouldn’t ignore someone when I was spoken to. Especially if it was the flight steward asking if I wanted a vegetarian meal, which yes, I very much did. No rudeness or fasting for me then, just zero mental stimulation.
My flight was scheduled for around 1 pm on a Sunday afternoon — not so late in the evening that I would be super sleepy, and not so early in the morning that my mind would run away to stressful thoughts about whether I had a Canadian plug adapter. It seemed the perfect time to just sit, stare and think.
Immediately, I knew I was wrong.
Hungry for my lunch and having seen on my seat-neighbour’s screen that Wonka was one of the films available, I instantly regretted my decision to try out this seemingly stupid trend. But, being the stubborn person that I am, I powered on into stillness and staring.
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Before even taking off, the other journalists accompanying me were looking at me weirdly. I didn’t blame them — the idea of being left alone to your thoughts does seem a questionable pastime, and one I am sure not many regularly partake in. Once I got past potentially having eyes on me, I soon began to enjoy listening to the different languages being spoken around me.
The sighs of a couple air stewards, and the captains mundane tone that said ‘this is the 1000th time I’ve given this speech’, are things I have always heard on flights but never spent any real time contemplating. When left with just your thoughts, there is nothing else to wonder about after the inner-lives of these aviation employees. This wasted about 15 minutes.
We reached take-off and I still wasn’t struggling. However, once we were up in the clouds I started to become irritable and bored. I tried to turn my mind to a recently read book and script a mental review of it, but I became annoyed I couldn’t write down any of my ideas.
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The arrival of dinner meant the next 30 minutes passed much faster. After I had eaten, for the next 45 minutes, I painstakingly sat and stared, checking the flight map every couple of minutes. My mind was blank. I couldn’t think of anything to think about, which only added to my irritation with the stupid ‘rawdogging’ trend.
Bored nearly to tears, I considered abandoning the plan early. Perhaps I’m not as hardcore as I thought, or as close to the cutting cultural edge as those who made the trend go viral on TikTok.
Among those at the forefront of the meditative trend are Australian music producer Torren Foot, who racked up 10 million views documenting his transpacific voyage from LA to Melbourne. Producer wudini was applauded for enduring an “insane dopamine detox” when he sat through a seven-hour flight without any entertainment.
“The power of my mind knows no bounds,” he claimed confidently.
Online cultural expert Josh Stuart has questioned how much value rawdogging actually has as a mental pursuit, asking whether it might be more of a masculine flex.
“This is the ice bath of the sky,” he told ABC. “It’s like a feat of strength. It’s being portrayed online as like the ultimate act of being able to tap into your ‘locked-in’ mentality.”
Not wanting to fall into any such toxically masculine-traps, but set on making it to some sort of significant marker point, I decided to see if I could make it to Iceland. When the small plane on the map in front of me came into line with mid-Iceland, I called it quits.
With a sigh of relief, I very quickly switched on Wonka and questioned why so many people claim to enjoy rawdogging. Whilst I can sit on the tube and let my thoughts run wild, or stare out of a train window for hours on end, there is something about doing nothing on a plane that I found considerably harder.
Maybe it was the excitement of going on holiday being brutally crushed by watching a plane icon move a millimetre every five minutes or just my desperation to watch Timothy Chalamet, but the painful experience of ‘rawdogging’ is one I will never force upon myself again.
Kudos to the people that have managed 8+ hour flights doing it — either you are lying or harbouring some huge secret.
