Rawdog: Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves

Rawdoging it at 35,000ft or how to open up yourself to demonic possession in the habitat of demons:

It was time to buckle up and face the void. I was going to “rawdog” this flight, a new trend in extreme air travel. Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social-media virality, overcome the longest of long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) by means of nihilism. They claim to spend the entire journey, perhaps as many as 18 hours, doing nothing other than staring at the flight map on the seat-back screen—no movies, no books, and, for the rawdoggiest, not even any meals. My flight was an embarrassingly modest 78 minutes long, but I didn’t last even 15. A purebred rawdogger might call me weak—unable to endure even the length of one Perfect Strangers before leaning on the artificial crutch of Spotify downloads, Fast & Furious films streamed via in-flight entertainment, young-adult fiction inhaled from an e-book reader, the lure of laptop work, or the foaming head of a Diet Coke poured from the rolling cart. Such is the sorry state of contemporary culture, they might lament, that these temptations of the flesh cannot be relinquished even temporarily. Rawdoggers seem to believe they have invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to say they have not? Whereas the Buddhist might accept the captive circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly snares, the rawdogger seeks to overcome them through refusal and its public performance. He rejects the movie. He rejects the frail crinkle of the plastic airline-refreshment cup. He rejects the tender sorrow that cruising altitude somehow always amplifies. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humankind, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascent. And then he publishes a TikTok as proof, which perhaps millions of people view.Thanks to its success as a meme, rawdogging has now been applied to deeds well beyond air travel: One can rawdog subway rides, cinema screenings, office work, mental illness (no meds!), meals (no sauce!), sports (no betting!). Most of these are jokes, and that’s sort of the point: Rawdogging is an aspiration, not an act. It is a fantasy of returning to a supposedly pure prior circumstance (which likely never really existed anyway), undertaken for symbolic exchange on social media, not as lived experience, let alone enlightenment. The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men. To be alive on Earth these days is to suffer the barrage of constant lures—sex, substance, gambling, sloth—so widely available and easily accessed that one must fight constantly to avoid their seduction. That state of affairs has diluted asceticism from the actual, if difficult, rejection of indulgence into a fetish for that abstinence. Rawdogging a flight is surely a fictional act—few would really, actually spend a transcontinental plane ride blinkered like a draft horse to the flight map. But talking about the idea—there’s a subreddit for that, surely. Source