iStockphoto / Bychykhin_Olexandr
Every so often a new trend explodes that’s so inane we’re forced to comment on it and this latest flight trend of guys going entire flights only staring at the GPS map in front of them qualifies as exactly that.
This trend is growing fast. It’s picked up some catchy albeit foul names online from ‘barebacking’ to ‘raw dogging’ flights. And the gist is that dudes get on flights with no book, nothing on their smartphone to watch or listen to, no Netflix or podcasts, and they just mindlessly stare at the map screen in front of them.
The ‘rawdogging flights’ trend has taken off so quickly that Kate Lindsay at GQ just published an articled titled ‘Why Men Are ‘Rawdogging’ Flights‘ where she caught up with the man who seems to have thrown gasoline on the fire of this trend.
Going by the name of WestWasHere on TikTok, a 26-year-old from London named West has gone viral several times for posting videos where he claims to have just there in silence for the entirety of his flight doing nothing but staring at the map screen. This was his first video. It’s caption reads “real men use landmarks they see out the window to work out the airspeed, u can’t trust anyone.’
Based on that caption one would suspect he doesn’t watch the GPS screen for the entirety of flights but this video with 1.9 million views shows that he’s clearly watching the screen that talks about speed, flight path, and ETA:
This is all so, so dumb. Yet somehow there appears to be a growing contingent of guys who are ‘rawdogging flights’ and coming to West to learn more about it.
He told GQ “I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights.’ Another person, a writer at Slate, told GQ “I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success. For some reason I don’t like processing new information when I’m in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”
The anxiety aspect of it I can understand but then why not just sleep? Is it also a fear of sedatives on flights? A fear of medication? A fear of therapy to tackle the underlying causes here that somehow outweighs the fear of flying that evidently isn’t enough to prevent someone from flying?
West has gone screen/book free on a 21-hour flight from London to Perth, Australia. My dude, that is 21 hours of your life that you are never getting back. Just admit to the folks that you are either asleep for 90% of it or making this all up.
It can take an estimated 150-200 hours to learn basic/rudimentary Japanese. You’re over 10% of the way there on a 21 hour flight. There’s an entire movement on rapid learning and a Josh Kaufman book titled ‘The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast!’ has been incredibly popular for years. His TED Talk has 39 million views!!!
While I’m aware that ‘rawdogging flights’ is a movement to do exactly the opposite of what I’m suggesting (to better one’s self) it has to be said that getting on a flight for hours on end and staring at a timer counting down to the destination is the single worst use of one’s time. Bring a notepad and write thank you’s to the people in your life who have had a positive impact. Read a book. Listen to a podcast from a perspective you normally wouldn’t be exposed to. Do literally anything but sit there and do nothing.
Why Is ‘Rawdogging Flights’ A Popular New Flight Trend
According to West and others who spoke with GQ, ‘rawdogging flights’ is a challenge similar to ‘No Nut November’ or doing a ‘Tough Mudder.’
Kate Lindsay of GQ writes “the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.” And then there are some comments from guys saying men don’t have the same ‘treat culture’ as women.
The only benefit mentioned from what I’ve seen is that guys engaging with this flight trend are left alone in complete solitude. Presumably, everyone around them thinks they’re crazy. Nobody wants to engage with someone unstable enough to get on a 21-hour flight with nothing to pass the time but staring at the back of the seat in front of them.
You know who else gets left alone on flights? People wearing headphones. People wearing masks who are sleeping. And pretty much anyone reading a book or who wants to be left alone.
I know it’s not a flight but I just drove 1,500 miles last weekend with only me and my dog in the car. It was the return trip from the 1,500 mile road trip I did from Florida to upstate NY a few weeks ago. I was able to finish 3 great audiobooks this weekend alone (‘The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon’, ‘The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, and ‘A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II).
Sure, I could have sat in the car in silence and stared at the road ahead of me, occasionally glancing at the GPS though the vast majority of the drive is I-95 so Google Maps wasn’t doing much of the heavy lifting. But I wouldn’t do that because I’m not an idiot. I had about 48 hours combined on the road over the course of two weekends this month and I used that time to learn and enrich my brain.
While this flight trend of ‘Rawdogging Flights’ might be painted as some sort of endurance challenge, the mere existence of endurance requires something be strenuous. This is the absence of strain. This is allowing one’s brain to turn to mush and shutting down. Only it’s not even that because it is staring at the most boring screen on the plane that just counts down the miles and minutes to the destination.
To any readers out there I beg of you, just read a book. Listen to a podcast. Write something interesting. Do anything but sit there and stare at a timer.