Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Rawdogging Boredom For Clout?

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Happy Wednesday! We hope your EIConcentration is feeling sharp as we dive into our conversation about a trend where boredom is the goal.In a piece for The New York Times, called “They Want to Influence You to Do…Nothing’’ Alexander Nazaryan explores how boredom is the “unlikely star of a social media fad that has young people doing… absolutely nothing.” The rules? No screens, no talking, no music, no food, no games and no napping for a fixed amount of time. The point? Apparently to improve your attention span and break your addiction to scrolling on social media. And many people claim that it works, that after completing their challenge they feel energised, focused, creative and free. But there’s some skepticism too, mostly about the fact that so many of the people doing this are also filming it and posting it online. Can you really be that serious about fixing the impacts of too much internet if you’re still doing everything for the internet?Thank you so much for all of your opinions and takes on this topic, we love being in conversation with you all.O, R, B xxThe Guardian - Friction-maxxing: could less convenience lead to much more happiness?Observer - How knitting became my scrolling antidote NY Times - They Want To Influence You to Do... NothingHarvard Business Review - You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why.The Guardian - Why it's good to be bored Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Richerra. And I'm Anoni. And this is Everything in Conversation. This is our midweek episode designed to get you over the hump of hump day and carry you safely to the Friday Main. We would love for you, yes you, to take part in these extra episodes, whether you agree with us or even better disagree with us. And you can get involved by following us on Instagram at Everything is ContentPod. That is where we decide on topics and open the floor for all of your opinions. So, the newest trend online is apparently being bored. In a piece of the New York Times called They Want to Influence You to Do Nothing, Alexander Nazarian explores how boredom is the unlikely star of a social media fad that has young people doing absolutely nothing.

And this is something I've actually been seeing quite a bit of on TikTok over the last few months with users calling the challenge raw-dogging boredom. The rules of this tend to be no screens, no talking, new music, no food, no games, no napping, basically nothing besides sitting quietly and waiting for the lot of time to run out. And the point of this is apparently to improve your attention span and break your addiction to scrolling on social media. And many raw doggers claim that it works, that after completing their challenge, they feel energized, focused, creative and free.

But there's some scepticism too, mostly about the fact that so many of the people doing this are also filming it and posting it online. Can you really be that serious about fixing the impacts of too much internet if you're still doing everything for the internet? I have to be honest though, I have been quite tempted to try this. My screen time last month just got so high and it was affecting my work and my emotions and my relationships and my life. In the end, I did just download one of those app blocker things and spent more time just off my phone, put it in a box and moved on. But it is tempting to think that you could sort of like break the circuit of addiction just by sitting quietly in your room. What do you both think? Is this bullshit or is it showing that young people are actually taking the impacts of phone addiction seriously and want to change it. I think I wrote a subset last year about the problem of people not being bored and we're of that generation, the castor generation where we did used to get bored and we learned to play and the generation's younger than us

maybe never actually experienced a phoneless, boneless life where we were just raw dogging for fun. I personally am sceptical that when you're filming something and you're kind of seeing it as a challenge like six hours with a phone in front of you is by its very nature not being bored because you're focused on a task and the task is sit still. boredom I think has to arise almost organically from a situation which you can't do anything about. For instance, say you're getting your nails done and they're both done the same time so you can't go on your phone and your nail technician isn't very chatty. So I saw a really funny reel the other day where it's like, so you start reading all the names of the nail polishes and then there's nothing else to do. And then you are sat there for an hour and then you do, you are a bit bored, but your brain starts working.

I think that like all you're waiting for a train. And there used to be so many instances where funny enough, it happened to be this Christmas actually. I was in Ireland and my phone was. dead so I plugged it in upstairs and everyone else was sat on their phones and I started feeling really awkward about the fact that I didn't have my phone like it was rude that I was sat there just being in the living room because it felt like it was impolite in some way to be as present as I was being. I was thinking about how funny that was because that would never have been an issue before. Anyway, my long point is I don't think this is really boredom. I think this is

just another trend and I don't think that the idea of boredom is not to do nothing. It's that boredom then spurs on creativity. So you might be bored for a little bit of time. Your mind begins to wander and then that creates an impulse for you to do something, whether it's create or go and create. I don't know. Basically, I think that boredom is a useful tool in getting you to act, but I don't think that sitting in front of your camera for six hours is making yourself bored. It's just giving yourself a completely pointless, unproductive task in view of clicks. Is that too cynical? What do you think, Ratura? This feels like boredom as an extreme sport and it's treating it like fasting or extreme eating where it's like the gorging of boredom and just trying to beat those

numbers and like kind of just proving that you can be the king of boredom and that's not really the same thing I completely agree with you boredom to me is languidly idly just thinking sitting existing being present with yourself and your thoughts to the world and most of the time that I've realized I've done that is to be honest by being on holiday and I don't know just like not having a SIM card that connects to the place you're in so you can't go on the Wi-Fi unless you're back at the hotel or just being on holiday and having so much extra time away from work that you, I end up just like filling my iPhone notes with all these ideas of things that I want to do, ideas for pieces, things that I want to do in my life. And that comes from day three probably because the first two days, well, me anyway, I'm just obsessing about stupid shit, getting really

anxious. And then that floods out of the way. And then I can actually be bored, but creatively bored. And I think that's so important. I think it is so interesting and so important for us to have those moments. But I don't think this is the route to getting there. I also think part of my New Year's resolutions was to cultivate time to be bored. So this is definitely something that I've really been fascinated by as a trend, I guess, that's coming back in. I think it does speak to something about how people are aware. Our attention is just depreciating in real time and really, you know, like probably bottom of the pile at the minute because of the internet, because of AI, just making things so frictionless. So I'm really fascinated that everyone seems to be feeling the same thing,

but I guess tackling it in different ways. I don't know if creating TikTok content about fasting your boredom is the way I would go about it, but I am actively trying to put my phone away, put it in different rooms. I'm not going on Instagram apart from 10 minutes a day and I'm treating it like a job to go in, go out, just see what I need to see and then leave it, leave it again. That's my method of doing it, probably not videoing myself for six hours. I am going to put on my pedants hat and I'm so sorry about it. We've got so many messages and also it ties into what you said where it's kind of like you reach this state where you're bored and you can create. We had a message from Jade who said love boredom, but you have to have a personality

for it. I would say, we're talking about boredom as if it is the absence of like basically being like too entertained. But I would say boredom really is a horrible state to be in it. It's like, it's agitation. It's confronting. It's like you don't have any creativity there because you can't think of anything. You're just like, I've got nothing to do. It's very, it's a really confronting state. And I think actually we and me as well have confused. I will often think, oh, I had a really boring day today. I was quite bored today. Whereas actually, I just didn't do things. I didn't. I maybe was alone with my thoughts, but I didn't on my phone or I had new signal. And I think the way that we talk about boredom is really interesting. Because I think actual

boredom is like dissatisfaction. It's absence of creativity. It's uncertainty. It's like you're a little prickly because there's something that you just don't have anything. Whereas I think if you've got a little, I think we're confusing peace with boredom because so few of us allow ourselves to be to have either. So it's like you say Richard, like, you work so hard, and then you go on holiday and you have, like, you power down and then you reach this state of like stillness where ideas are coming, where you're kind of like, oh, I'm not doing anything. It's so different than what normal modern life is that we almost, I think, miss assign it, this label of like, oh, I'm being boring, I'm bored.

Actually, I think that's a state, that's like a real flow state. I think that's peace, which to me, and maybe this is me misunderstanding boredom is like the opposite of bored. What I think these teenagers and these young people are doing is genuinely putting themselves in an uncomfortable state akin to like a monk's meditation where like for 15 minutes they do nothing and it like is painful. And I was reading a piece about Warden by Elhan which we can link. And she talks about this experiment they did. I think it was Harvard University where they put people alone in a room with a button. For 15 minutes, nothing to do. If you press the button,

it would give you an electric shock. Most participants would press this button. One guy pressed it 190 times in 50 minutes, 15 minutes, sorry, because he could not bear to be bored so much that he would rather experience something unpleasant. And so I think actually, I think it's bullshit that they're filming it for TikTok, but I think it's really admirable. They are putting themselves in this human state that is so uncomfortable that it can cause people to rather be electrocuted. I just, basically, I just don't know what boredom is fundamentally because I never allow myself to feel it. But I don't know if because you know you have an outcome for this, which is a prize of posting it to the internet and creating a piece of content, if that constitutes actually being bored, because

like you said, I think boredom is the absence of action. And actually, no, it's the boredom, I think, has to be born. It's like, you have no control over the circumstance. You're bored because you physically cannot find something to entertain you. I think that there is, as much as it must be really hard. I think it's like what Ruchera said, it's, it's an endurance challenge. And I think it's such a good point about the binging. One of the things I love watching on TikTok and I obsess with are like muckbangs. There's something about the grossness, the overconsumption of it. And I completely agree, it's like there is, it would be probably less effective in terms of like, Instagram. Because what this is ultimately, it's creating clickbait. How many of us have said,

leave your phone in your room and go on a walk and that will really, you know, change your life. Like, no one cares. If you post a video that's a time lapse of you sat there for six hours on a chair, it's going to get loads of views. It might make you money. By virtue of which I think it annals this idea of boredom because there is like a goal, you're doing it with a purpose. I just, maybe that's, I just don't think it works. And I think that I don't think I've experienced true boredom like I used to when I was younger. But then I always remember the times when I should have been bored being the most fun. For instance, like in the garden, I made like a whole fairy area at the garden. I found there was like this twig on a tree that I could jump up and down on, like,

because I was forced to create. Whereas I think my ability to create scenarios or my imagination has been so dulled by constant dopamine rushing, constant information. I don't know how much sitting in a room and filming myself with the goal of posting online in order to get the dopamine rush of knowing that I'm going to get loads of likes. And maybe you might get some productive ideas in those six hours, but it very much felt like these kids, unfortunately, are already too internet adult in their brains that they're probably just thinking about pound signs that were going to happen after they posted. Yeah, I do agree with you that having this big shiny potential at the end kind of defeats the middle part of the process of being bored. I think

you're completely right. It doesn't feel the same to me. I do think there's a powerlessness to real boredom that is inherent to what that means. And also, I feel like the subject is so interesting because you've got the people doing that, which is the extreme sports of being bored, pushing that online, just kind of getting the biggest figures they can in terms of the amount of hours that they can literally do nothing, not even eat as well, some of these people, by the way. And then you have, I think you posted this in the group, Beth, a piece in the cut on friction maxing, which is the slow, constant accumulation of friction in your life. So, you know, not using chat GPT to come up with replies to friends or a boss in your life. then also not listening to music while you're waiting for an Uber or a bus or on the train, you read a book instead. And that I feel like I can get behind more.

I don't necessarily feel that I would do that for every single part of my life. But I do think that's the thing I'm thinking of perhaps following more, just finding little pockets where I don't just press the dopamine button in my head for more, more, more, just kind of making my existence a bit more tricky to kind of spur my mind into not just reaching for my phone constantly. And I think if you have the kind of raw dogging boredom versus the friction maxing, God, that is such a 20, 25 sentence. I feel like I'm more of a friction maxer than a raw dog out of boredom. And I think that's really healthy.

Also to understand what you can gain from it. Because in the way that you see this as kind of meditation, as a kind of circuit breaker, as just making yourself as bored as possible, putting yourself in that kind of really fast state so you're less likely to think that you have to pick up your phone basically, to prove to yourself that you don't need to. I just know, I'm not a meditator for the reason that it really doesn't work for me. I need some sort of action in my meditation. But for some people, like it is really, probably is really valuable for them to put themselves

into an uncomfortable situation. Like, it's the people that stand under the cold water and get the biggest benefits. They're often men, but like it does, it can help women have different ways of having that, of kind of achieving the same thing. I just think it's knowing yourself, but also a lot of us are just addicted to our phones. And someone in the piece said it's sort of like, for some people, it's sort of like, if a binge drinker takes a single day off drinking, but then return to drinking in the same or even increased quantities the next day. Like that's not healthy. It's not recovery just because

you can say, there it is. I've taken my day off. It's like, what matters is what you do after the raw talking. And if the raw talking doesn't work for you, then I kind of do think that you need to look elsewhere and do that kind of like return to the good old days where you do just put some necessary friction in your life so that when something happens when there's traffic or when something, like a generally boring moment comes along like your phone on a flight and your TV's broken or whatever it is, you don't have a meltdown because you know I'm an adult. I'm not a baby or the pacifier or a dummy or whatever. I can survive it. So I think I can see the merit in the raw dogging. I'm not going to do it myself. I'm probably going to do a

softer version of that where I'm like, I need a hobby. I'm going to do a puzzle. I'm going to listen to an album. My phone's going to go in a box, something like that. I don't know. I imagine not these young people who are filming it, but I'm imagining someone watching that in like a bad way, desperate to get off their phone but not knowing how doing it not filming it and actually getting some benefit from it and that i'm finding quite encouraging as a first step not like the whole thing because i think you do have to then do something else but i do think there's something in this of like being so desperate to get off your phone that you are willing to try this i think that is encouraging at the very least i suppose if you're filming it you can't use your phone maybe that is why you have

to film it because it's the only way to stop me from going on a phone i'm definitely a friction maxer because i do do that thing i've done that thing now where i don't take my headphones on not on long train journeys, but mostly if I was like getting on the tube, whatever, I don't bring headphones with me so that I have to. But it is that funny thing if I then actually do feel a bit embarrassed and awkward if I'm not on my phone because it feels like I'm doing something wrong. Like I'm a pervert in public by not like kind of ignoring everyone and stealing lances to my phone.

You're an attention pervert. Yeah, so true. We had a message from Maya saying, I'm fully behind that narrative that phones are stealing attention spans, creativity, etc. But I don't think that sitting doing nothing is the answer. When I was younger, I didn't just sit and do nothing. I did arts and crafts. Even now I knit and sew a lot to avoid my phone.

played with toys and made-up stories and crucially didn't film myself doing it. It wasn't for anyone or for any particular purpose. It's just fun. That's what I feel like we're losing. And I don't think filming yourself lying on a budging floor is necessarily bringing that back. Sorry if I sound like a boomer, loll. Don't worry. I think we are all boomers.

I think millennials are boomers now. I think we're like, where of that generation. I agree. When I read that, what I was thinking was, it's so funny that phones have become the replacement for that because that is where even the least creative person you know before phones,

when you had nothing to do, would doodle, do a crossword, do a Suducopopo podcast. or maybe have some knitting, make something. Like the pockets of time that used to be down boredom time would actually be filled with things that are probably really good for our brains. And now it is just, ooh, open phone, look at pictures and video. And so I do think that's what's funny is a lot of the time,

the time that was boredom was actually filled with things that we now are like, oh my God, you do a hobby? It's become like a real rarity. And there is a real problem with as well if you are doing something. I mean, there are millions of people making contents of them coloring in coloring books. Like nothing is not filmed. So more often than not, even if you are doing it, it then becomes another piece of content.

And I think that that is, it's actually quite hard to get your head around the matrix of it all because that is so interesting to think. I can remember, like all people pick up the phone. You call a friend, I always remember my mum being on the phone with her phone, like in her shoulder. And she always used to doodle on a notepad. I can't remember the last time I saw her doodling.

But that was such a thing. But now you're just always texting or sad. It is sad. And I feel like there's so much to say on it. You're right. because it's like the pyramid of everything combining it. It's like productivity, over productivity, this idea that every minute has to be spent doing something.

But ironically, a lot of that is just emails and just going on our phones rather than like doing anything interesting. And then the idea of boredom feels like an attack on that. The first thing I wanted to say to Maya's message was, I read an amazing piece by Sarah Monavis, friend of the podcast, in The Observer on how picking up knitting has been the inadvertent way she's basically halved her screen time.

And she was talking about how we all have this austerity mindset when it comes to reducing our screen time, which is this idea that we have to take away, we have to reduce, we have to fast, we have to, you know, diet, detox, all of these kind of words and language as well. It's all very much subtracting. And it was this amazing realization for her that if you add, that immediately just kind of halves away the negative things about your phone life, even with friction maxing, even though there's maxing in the word, it is about making your life more difficult. And maybe there are just nicer waves of going about this. And I think you're right from what you said before, Beth, that everyone will probably be drawn to different, you know,

whether it's the maxing or not doing the austerity mindset and adding something in. But I think it's almost presented as if there's one way to halve your screen time, and that is by doing these extreme things. And I don't think that is the case. We also had a message from Fiona that said, this is wild and unhinged. Humanity really has lost the plot. We do not need content of doing nothing,

because making it content is in itself feeding the screen time, which is falsely aiming to target. We can all just do nothing without recording it. I think that's such a good point, isn't it? Because then it's suddenly not nothing. It's one of those really weird, trippy things. Like on first glance, I'm like, brilliant. Because I am forgetting that I'm watching.

I'm so used to content being shot as though it's completely genuine as though someone hasn't sat on the camera that I'm like, great, someone's doing nothing. I'm like, no, they're not doing nothing. They're creating content, which is very much as something. And it's one of the most online some things. I think it's such, I think the response to this just exposes what we think, which is, there is a problem here. Bordom is not the enemy.

Basically, bored, when you're a kid, people are like, you're bored, find something to do. Bordom is like an empty space. It's a question. Whereas completely zoning out on your phone is that is the answer. Just do more and more and more of that because you'll never reach the end. Whereas I do remember being bored

and being told to think of something and you always would because the state of being bored was just intolerable. You would find something, whether it was getting up to like no good, getting up to child crimes, or if it was playing a game or doing a puzzle or creating something.

If I was a child and I had a phone to go on, would have gone on the phone and I wouldn't have come out for the rest of my life. So I do, I'm trying to see the privilege in being, in growing up not as an iPad baby. And I read this L Hunt piece, which I will put in the show notes, which is called Why It's Good to Be Bored. But she quotes John D. Eastwood, who is the co-author of a book called Out of My Skull, the Psychology of Borem, which I thought was really interesting. And he writes, all too often when we're bored, we see ourselves as passive, empty vessels to fill. We look for stimuli that will get rid of the bad feeling in the short term, but it doesn't foster and grow our capacity of agency.

And that's exactly what we need to be free from boredom and its negative consequences. I thought that was a really interesting kind of intellectual angle, which I hadn't thought of, which is kind of like it is an invitation to do something interesting and to teach your brain over in the long term that actually there's nothing to be feared from boredom. You can think of something else. You don't have to then turn that fear of boredom into becoming a dopamine addict, which I definitely am and would like to change this year.

Yeah, there's so many things. because I've also started knitting again and whenever I remember to knit I love it too because you literally cannot use your phone and I wrote this in my 25, 25 subset but two things I recommended were like things to do were running and knitting because they're the only hours of my day

when I literally cannot go on my phone. Running is a bit like you Beth, I can't just sit and meditate but I do find myself in a meditative state on a long run because you kind of you get to the point where the running just becomes a rhythm, your breathing levels out and then it's probably the only time that I enter into

what I imagine some people's brains are like all the time which is just kind of quite a calm meditative state. But I would find that extremely hard to do just sitting still. It's just not really how my brain works. But I do seem to get into that through like exercising or even knitting. And I think that is literally because I'm not, I'm never giving myself the chance to feel meditative because I just am on my phone all the time. And we had a good message from Anam that said,

I, for one, I'm thankful that when I wait for a bus or a friend in a cafe for mates down the pub, I have a tiny dopamine distraction in the shape of my phone. I don't think this is about boredom at all and more to do with our unhealthy attachments to our phones and how we treat other. there's also a weird bit of virtue signaling wrapped up in it like oh look at me I'm not attached my phone I can live without it which I personally think is BS because most of the time they're posting their digital detoxes online which is kind of what we've been saying that's so true but even over the Christmas period I kept getting the surge to be like I need to do a post about Christmas and then I was really challenging myself like what if I just keep the photos on my phone what if I don't put them online and it was like a really if I was paying a game and I was like what if these just don't go post online and I'm really trying to make my real life matter to me in reality even if I don't post it online and seeing it how much that actually changes the things that I do in the way that I live my life, because it's gone too far now where I do think that actually massive parts of my personality are completely shaped through the prism of thinking, when I post this, this is what people will identify as me,

brand and only, rather than like, how would I actually spend this day if I didn't think I was in the Truman Show and everyone was watching? I also really loved Polly's message. She wrote in and said, as a Quaker and a yoga fan, I think boredom needs a rebrand as stillness, quiet and peace. And it just, her message really reminded me of what you said, Beth, where it's like there is a difference between actual boredom and the something else, the flow state, the state where we can create, we can think, we can find in a piece possibly the meditative state you were talking about when you run an only. And I do think it is different possibly to actual boredom.

And maybe it would be helpful to think of it as two separate things and maybe stillness is a nicer way of framing it because I think that's what we are aiming for. You know that feeling in a yoga class where after you finish and you, lie on the ground and you're just completely almost like dead on the floor. And you never feel a piece like that. I think there is a way to aim for that over abject boredom. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your opinions and takes on this topic. Whether we got five responses or 100, we read and we appreciate every single one. Please also give us a follow on Instagram and TikTok at Everything is Content Pod.

And please, please, please give us a review wherever you listen if you haven't already. We'll see you as always on Friday. Bye. Bye. Just honestly, when Richard was like, raw-doging boredom or friction, it's like, oh my God, I love the way we are using the new,

like the English language has never been uglier.