Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves
Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved.
By Ian Bogost
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.