The viral TikTok travel trend known as “rawdogging” was originally invented to avoid digital stimulation. In said trend, a person (usually a guy) will just stare off into space for the entirety of their flight, abstaining from anything that might be construed as an activity—be it watching a movie, listening to a podcast, or even reading. At most, a rawdogger will entertain themselves with the flight tracker map. Some people have referred to this as a form of “meditation.” Others have called it “just plain stupid.” Well, now, in a turn of events that is inarguably stupid, rawdogging is going digital. Somebody decided to make a flight rawdogging simulator, where you can pretend to stare off into space from the safety of your own living room.
Rawdog Airlines is a free online game in which players board a flight, pick a seat, and then proceed to sit and stare into the middle distance for as long as they can possibly stand it. The game claims to use “eye tracking” technology to ensure that you stay focused on your computer screen and aren’t cheating by diverting your gaze. When you’re done rawdogging, the game records how long you played and, if you’re one of the top rawdoggers, your results are published to a public list on the game’s website. As of the writing of this blog, it would appear that the player known as “mew no last name” is the reigning champ, with a recorded 18 hours and 40 minutes of gameplay. Holy shit.
Rawdogging recently became popular on TikTok, which is a breeding ground for droves of similarly brain-dead “trends.” Many of these trends aren’t so much real-world phenomena as stunts performed by influencers to feed their follower counts. It’s unclear whether people in the real world actually rawdog flights with any statistically significant regularity.
As far as I can tell, rawdogging was actually pioneered not by attention-seeking Gen-Z goofballs, but by Seinfeld which, in 1997, aired the episode “The Butter Shave,” in which Elaine’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, David Puddy, infuriates her by refusing to read, nap, or otherwise do anything except stare straight ahead in a brain-dead kind of fugue state:
We salute you, Puddy. You were a real rawdogger—maybe the only one.
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