"Rawdogging" is a term that was popularized a couple of years back, when people started using the word to describe the unmediated friction of sitting through a flight without any distractions. Video after video began to appear on TikTok, each featuring someone engaging in activities like looking out the window, people watching, or staring ahead while thinking. Introspection — a term formalized by early psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener to refer to conscious inward focus — is neither new nor useless. People have been doing nothing — and doing it constructively — for aeons. It's only in recent history that we've developed an anxious and avoidant relationship with downtime.
This revived form of introspection saw TikTokers declining to use technology to distract themselves in one of the most classically stressful, boring, and awkward environments there is: trapped in a cramped plane seat for hours with strangers. It isn't particularly easy for us to spend time in our own minds without distraction. In fact, whether or not you're on a plane, it has never been easier to avoid. There's the infinite scroll to keep your brain active, and the 7,000 unread emails. In our pocket sits a device that is a portal to all existing human knowledge. So why should we sometimes elect to sit and do absolutely nothing instead? Well, because this is when the brain's default mode network is active.
Neurologist Marcus Raichle referred to a "baseline default mode of brain function" in 2001. He used it to describe how the brain functions in a resting state — not deeply focused on goal-oriented tasks or distracted by external stimuli, but engaged in internally directed thinking. Raichle's research suggested that the brain is constantly in action, even when our focus is not directed toward something external. The default mode network is a group of regions in the brain that are active when our focus is allowed to wander, and nothing else is demanding immediate attention.
It could take your thoughts into a pleasant daydream about an upcoming trip, remind you that you need to get milk, or produce an idea for a novel. It also might default to nauseatingly anxious rumination about how you could fall on your face as you walk up to deliver a presentation at work. We've all experienced both — the pleasant meandering of an unperturbed mind and the aversive horrors of a vengeful one.
Sitting without distraction essentially exposes us to our own minds without the anaesthetic of avoidance through constant external stimulation. Our reliance on distracting technology everywhere suppresses our ability to tolerate our brain's unpredictable, wandering default mode. Constant distraction can dull our capacity to manage the discomfort that arises when we sit quietly. For previous generations, this resting mental state was not optional. Long road trips in childhood and waiting rooms with no reading material were routine opportunities for people to automatically default to some form of introspection. Now, we can theoretically outrun our brain's baseline mode most of the time. This may adversely impact our attention span and ability to focus, and can contribute to an inability to sit in our own company without unravelling.
This trend is a new name for an old practice. While popularized by social media users who treat staring at a screen on a 14-hour flight as a sort of resilience test, mindfulness meditation is rooted in philosophy that predates TikTok. It's also utilized in numerous therapeutic methodologies for managing anxiety and reframing our reaction to challenging thoughts. Left to itself, our brain will overthink a conversation or stress over hypothetical future events. Mindfulness meditation entails observing what your mind is doing in its default mode without being carried off by thoughts. There is evidence that over time, meditation practice is associated with a less active default mode network. By noticing the pattern of thoughts and feelings entering our awareness, we can become more discerning.
What a meditation practice and its cousin, "rawdogging," offer is a conscious experience of the default mode network — an awareness that we aren't necessarily bored so much as avoidant. We're afraid of what our brain will do if we permit it a disengaged moment. When we are accustomed to perpetual distraction, our default mode can feel intolerable. When it does, cat videos are not the answer. Rawdogging a long flight may not be either — some contexts merit a little distraction more than others. But a few minutes of mindfulness meditation daily? That sounds more realistic.