If you’ve been anywhere near social media in the past few months, you’ve almost certainly encountered the “raw dogging” flight trend. The premise is deceptively simple: board a long flight, refuse all entertainment, decline food and drinks, and sit in complete stillness staring at the flight tracking map — for hours. Sometimes for flights of 12+ hours.
Videos of men (and increasingly women) documenting their “raw dogging” achievements — particularly on ultra-long haul routes from New York to Singapore or London to Sydney — have accumulated hundreds of millions of views. The comment sections are a fascinating mix of admiration, confusion, and “why though?”
The “why though” question turns out to have a surprisingly substantive answer rooted in psychology and neuroscience.
The Psychology of Chosen Discomfort
Dr. Michael Easter, author of “The Comfort Crisis” and a researcher of voluntary hardship, explains the phenomenon in terms of what he calls “misogi thinking” — the deliberate pursuit of difficult, voluntary challenges as a way of recalibrating your relationship with comfort, boredom, and self-efficacy.
When everything in modern life is optimized for your comfort — noise-canceling headphones, infinite entertainment, on-demand food delivery — the ability to sit with discomfort atrophies. Deliberately choosing the harder option (no screen, no snacks, just you and your thoughts for 10 hours at 35,000 feet) is, paradoxically, a psychological power move.
What It Actually Trains
Distraction tolerance is genuinely a cognitive skill, and like most cognitive skills, it degrades without practice. Research on attention shows that the average human’s ability to maintain focused attention without distraction has measurably declined over the past 20 years — a trend that correlates with smartphone adoption and the infinite scroll design of social media platforms.
Sitting with boredom — real, unrelieved boredom — has been shown in studies to increase creative thinking, activate the default mode network (associated with insight and self-reflection), and improve the quality of subsequent focused work. Boredom, it turns out, is not a problem to be solved. It’s a psychological state that serves important functions we’ve largely engineered out of modern life.
Why The Flight Map, Specifically
The flight map element is interesting. It provides just enough low-grade stimulus to anchor attention without providing entertainment or meaningful distraction. It’s a minimal viable focus object — something to look at without engaging higher cognitive functions. Practitioners describe it as a meditative state, and neurologically, that’s actually accurate: the attentional state of watching slow, predictable movement with no requirement for response closely mirrors certain meditation practices.
The Broader Signal
What makes this trend genuinely interesting beyond the humor is what it says about the cultural moment. The fact that doing nothing — genuinely nothing, on purpose, for hours — has become impressive and aspirational enough to go viral suggests a collective awareness that we may have optimized our lives too thoroughly for comfort and stimulation.
You don’t have to raw dog a transatlantic flight to benefit from this insight. Simply leaving your phone in your pocket for a 20-minute walk, eating a meal without looking at a screen, or sitting quietly for 10 minutes without filling the space with a podcast are the accessible versions of the same practice. Your attention is the most valuable resource you have. Training it — even a little — pays dividends.