Over the upcoming holiday season, something like 7.5 million people will step foot in an airport and take to the skies. That’s a lot of delays, a lot of airport beers, and a lot of wondering about how the person in front of you has seemingly never gone through a security checkpoint before. But it also means a lot of in-flight entertainment. So, before the chaos-fueled travels begin, The Ringer is proud to introduce Airplane Movies Day, in honor of the things we watch on our tiny seat-back screens to get us through the flight.
A new trend went viral this year in which people—usually men, for reasons that probably speak volumes—spend entire flights doing absolutely nothing, with absolutely no aids for passing the time. “Raw-dogging a flight,” these people call it. No in-flight entertainment. No books. No headphones. No food. No drinks. You can’t even use the bathroom. It’s just you, your thoughts, and the flight tracker, from the moment the plane takes off to whenever it touches the ground. (There’s a free raw-dog simulator online if you want to try it. It’s as terrifying as it sounds.)
When the editors at The Ringer announced that we would be doing a package on in-flight entertainment, it was only natural to link up with this trend and have someone consume exactly none of it. A raw blog for content. A chance to interrogate our life choices. To ask questions like: Why the hell are all of these raw-dog guys putting themselves through so much unnecessary torture? How safe is it to let modern, screen-obsessed male minds wander into nothingness inside a tube in the sky? Has the “dudes rock” meme gone a step too far? This trend seems so weird and boring, but it’s also kind of awesome in a dumb dude-brain way. It reminds me of when your friend taps you on the shoulder and says, “SMELL THIS.” With a call to action like that, of course you should resist. And yet. I’ve never not smelt it.
And since I’ve spent the past year or so fashioning myself into The Ringer’s survival expert, it was obvious—to me and the aforementioned editors—that I was the right candidate for the endeavor. I volunteered to raw-blog a flight from New York to San Diego that I had already booked as the back end of an unrelated work trip. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone—and I felt strongly that the minimum distance for the experiment had to be coast-to-coast. But my bet is that my editors didn’t care about the stones or the birds; they just saw the perfect test subject. I was diagnosed with ADD and ADHD combined as a kid. And I don’t usually like to assign catchall traits for people with either disorder, but here’s how I’ve always described the cocktail I’m working with: I can’t sit still or shut up. I’m always moving or making sounds. It’s that simple (and that annoying). And so this raw blog was concocted with an added feature: Not only would we be testing an already extreme viral trend, but we’d also be using a subject whose entire makeup is diametrically opposed to this activity. Not that that’d reveal anything deeper about raw-dogging—it’d just make for a better raw blog. (Is the name catching on?)
Airplane Movies Day
An experiment like this requires rules. Raw-dogging obviously means no media outside the images in your brain, but my editors and I both agreed that all experiments require a written record, so we decided to permit me to write notes on a controlled schedule: for two minutes at the top of the second, third, and fourth hours of the flight, for a total of six minutes across the five-and-a-half-hour flight. All other raw-dogging restrictions applied: Every other minute had to be spent without screens, food, drinks, sleep. All of it.
My day-of game plan was flawless. I was going to pack my suitcase the night before the fight so that I could Uber straight to JFK right after I woke up. I would get to the airport early so that I could grab a coffee, use the bathroom, and juice my brain with a bit of brain rot before diving into the silence. I also planned to buy a pen and a notebook for my notes. Everything was coming together. In the days leading up to the flight, I was honestly getting excited about the idea. And then I got to Stage 0 of the five stages of raw-blogging a flight.
Stage 0: Complete and Utter Dread
I woke up late. Also, I didn’t pack my suitcase like I said I would, so I had to do that while calling the Uber I should’ve scheduled. I didn’t have time to shower or even run a final sweep of the hotel room before running out the door. (Once I got into the Uber, I immediately remembered that I’d left my shampoo, conditioner, soap, and toothbrush in the hotel bathroom.) The driver had his phone propped up, so I could see that the estimated arrival time was in 42 minutes, at 7:25 a.m., 30 minutes before my flight was scheduled to start boarding. Scary, but doable. I exhaled.
Not even 10 minutes later, just as I started to sink into a deep, dark doomscroll on TikTok, the driver started waving his hands at me to have me pull out my AirPods. (I wanted to run up my screen time while I had the chance, but the algorithm had trapped me in an endless run of clips from Cops Reloaded. It wasn’t pretty.) He pointed at his phone and said, “It looks like there’s been an accident.” The estimated arrival time had moved to 7:44 a.m., and it just kept going up, minute by minute. It was 7:57 a.m. by the time I walked into Terminal 2 at JFK—two minutes after my flight had started boarding.
This is where I think God stepped in. The security lines were long, man. I was panicking. I had never missed a flight before, let alone a work flight. But after I spent just minutes waiting in the line, TSA opened up two additional lanes. I veered into the open hole like prime Adrian Peterson, blitzed through security, and sprinted to my gate, arriving just in time to be the second-to-last person on the airplane.
Another exhale. And then another panic attack.
I hadn’t had the chance to do any of my raw-dog prep. No early arrival. No coffee. No pen and paper. No real time spent on my phone or computer before running onto the plane and collapsing into my middle seat (27B) in a full-on sweat. I raw-dogged the raw dog. Suddenly, as the thought of emails I could not read, videos of the Rizzler I could not watch, and episodes of Ryen Russillo’s travelogues I could not listen to filled my brain, a realization set in: I was fucking dreading this flight. Like, truly dreading it. Why did I do this? Could I even do this?
The only thing I could do was take my fear and pain and frustration and panic and pour it into my Notes app while the wheels were still on the ground.
- A MIDDLE SEAT. YOU’RE KIDDING. A MIDDLE SEAT. This is going to kill me.
- It’s kind of wild that the airport is called the JFK airport. Are there any other airports named after presidents? I feel like presidents rarely get naming rights to such heavily used things … streets, sure, but no one says street names anymore. We’ll be saying JFK forever.
- Why am I already abnormally hot?? I feel like the stress is killing me. I don’t want to do this!!! Why is this a thing? I don’t get it.
- My stomach, neck, and back hurt. My chest hurts. What a disaster!!! I feel like I’m overreacting, but that’s part of it right?! Like this is normal?
- I’m also scared of what I’m even going to think about?! There’s no SHOT any idle mind doesn’t eventually wander to the black.
- Goddamn, this is going to suck.
- I feel like I’m going to vomit.
- We’re still on the ground.
As someone who frequently experiences fits of anxiety, I can honestly say that this was one of the worst in my adult life. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally dreading spending a full five and a half hours in a middle seat on an airplane doing absolutely nothing. “Prepare for takeoff,” the pilot said. And so I did, turning off my phone and staring into the abyss.
Stage 1: I Spy With My Little Eye … (the First Hour or So)
My first thought was that the only way to survive this ring of hell was to meticulously observe everything. I had a weird yellow stain on my jeans. It was small and dark but noticeable. It was fucking yellow. If a stain on your jeans is prominent enough to have a color, people will notice it. Was it food? Was it from dinner the night before? Did I really wear those jeans the night before and for my flight the next morning? Jesus, when was the last time I washed these jeans?
I couldn’t stop thinking about the stain because I couldn’t stop thinking about the women to my left and right thinking about the stain. Then I started to worry that they were looking at me, some idiot doing nothing on a plane for one of two reasons, both of which are deeply embarrassing: (A) I am a crazy person who doesn’t abide by societal norms or (B) I am an extremely online human copying a viral internet trend. And so I did the only thing I could think to do: I started looking at them.
The woman to my left was in her mid-20s. I think?! I’m not good at guessing ages. She could have been 40. I was also focusing more on the stuff she had in front of her rather than on her actual face, lest she think I was staring at her like a weirdo. She somehow already had a smashed plastic cup in the seat pocket in front of her. Did she finish it as she was boarding? Or was it already there from the last flight? Maybe she was the first one to board. To my right was an older woman, maybe early 50s. She shook me out of my stupor early on when she asked me to help her find the charging port for her phone. I don’t even remember whether I said anything back. I just grabbed the cord and started punching it underneath the seat in front of her. It was not a smooth assist. She looked like a Deborah, so we’ll call her Debs.
Debs fired open her laptop before the seat belt sign was even off. It was a ThinkPad with some wear and tear. (High-effort player at work?! We love to see it.) She had an old-school, up-by-your-bootstraps attitude, and she was reading work emails in a font size that had to have been at least 100. She was also backgrounding the Today show with headphones in. I respected the grind. Debs was making plays, staying productive. Happy for her, but I also knew I couldn’t hang on to Debs’s every move without cheating on the “no screens” rule. That was when I made the pivot to one of the biggest letdowns of the experiment: the flight tracker.
I truly went into this mission thinking the flight tracker would be an ally. I thought it would at least help me pass the time in a more interesting way than a blank screen, but as it turns out, United has a lackluster flight tracker. Zero aura on this flight tracker. There was no flyover map, just some slides with calls to action for $10 WiFi and United’s MileagePlus membership thing and a bunch of miscellaneous data about the flight: time to destination, local time at origin, altitude, outside temperature, distance to destination, local time at destination, headwind, ground speed. It was a joke! It was boring! The flight tracker was supposed to be a heavy minutes player for me, and it barely ever came off the bench.
Stage 2: Regretting Everything (Probably Only 30-40 Minutes In, but Felt Way Longer)
Stage 2 was a dogfight. With the minutes ticking by on the time to destination slide of the flight tracker like some kind of sky-bound version of Chinese water torture, I couldn’t help but think of all the things I wish I had done differently in my life. It was a lot of mulling over mostly small grievances, but we also went over some big regrets and misses. I don’t think this was a net-negative experience, though. The buildup in Stage 0 was 100 times worse. I never fully cried during this part, but my eyes welled up a few times. I crossed my arms on the little pullout table in front of me and put my head down the times I really felt it, just so Debs didn’t catch me. It felt sort of therapeutic and like I was keeping busy. Let’s not trauma dump, though; we’ll push on to the next stage.
Stage 3: Reevaluating Everything (Another Hour or So)
The biggest highlight of this stage was that it started with the first of two songs that got stuck in my head: “Empire State of Mind” by JAY-Z featuring Alicia Keys. (“BIG LIGHTS WILL INSPIRE YOU / LET’S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK NEW YORK NEW YORK.”) This was also the stage when I was asked whether I wanted a snack or a drink, to which I mundanely replied: “No, thanks.” Those two words would be the only words I uttered the entire flight.
Anyway, in between singing in my head—“CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OF!”—I started to flip from assessing a lot of old stuff, specifically regrets, to going over my current processes. I thought about what I need to prioritize more, what I need to prioritize less, where I can improve in terms of efficiency versus effort. I was planning a move and still am planning a wedding, so I was brainstorming there. (I’m leaning black suit. I feel like it’s classy. I’m also leaning Thai for the reception dinner. Is that bold?) This honestly felt less therapeutic, and I’m not sure I can blame Alicia Keys for that. I started to feel pretty overwhelmed. And without any content to distract me from it, one thought in particular started to flash in my mind: Here on this airplane, I was wasting away five and a half fucking hours of my life. My rotting brain is a content garbage disposal that needs to be fed. I need to comb through all of the pointless emails I’ve subscribed to but never make the time to read or unsubscribe from. I need to add a “ha ha” reaction to my buddy’s good-not-great joke in the group chat. I need to binge all three seasons of Industry before I binge Slow Horses and then The Penguin. I need to run a triple feature from the front row of the theater. I need to see how many booms the Rizzler gave the double chocolate chunk cookie. I just need to scroll, man. I need to feed.
But I couldn’t. Instead, my eyes just wandered. The 20-something woman to my left was reading the description for the movie I Saw the TV Glow. I was hoping she’d watch it, but she passed. Ridiculous. That’s a good movie! And the poster is fantastic. The fact that she even wanted to read the description first tells me all I need to know. Debs was still cooking on emails. LFG, Debs.
The hardest part of this stage and the next stage, honestly, was not falling asleep. The exhaustion came in waves. I’d go from hot and buzzing on an idea to nearly passed out in minutes. What good is staying awake if I can’t watch Suits at two-time speed on Netflix or verbally assault Grouchy Uncle Domino in the TikTok comments? The fight to stay up was an all-out war.
Stage 4: Manifest and Chill (No Idea)
Enter the next song: “All of Me” by John Legend. (“MY HEAD’S UNDERWATER / BUT I’M BREATHING FINE.”)
The woman to my left eventually fired up Anyone but You, the romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney. I couldn’t help but watch it! It was in my peripherals! But not even Sydney could hold my attention; I was dialed.
This was really the first time in the exercise when I feel like I might have actually benefited from the whole thing. I spent a lot of time thinking about all the stuff I want to accomplish in the future. It was a lot of forward-looking thinking and goal setting. There were moments when it felt like I wasn’t thinking at all. It was an opportunity to just breathe. I realized I don’t do that a lot: Sit. Breathe. Reflect. It forced me to take my foot off the gas (and my eyes off this guy meal prepping Korean bulgogi burritos). I felt fully relaxed. The time flew by so fast I barely noticed it. It wasn’t until they made an announcement over the speaker that we were beginning our descent that I remembered I fucking hate this shit.
Stage 5: The Countdown (the Last 30-40 Minutes)
As soon as I knew it was almost over, I couldn’t control myself. I was ready to explode. It’s like those times when you really need to pee, and the closer you actually get to the restroom, the more it feels like you need to go. I refocused on the flight tracker and literally counted down every minute until we put wheels on the ground. I was jostling back and forth like Jon Gruden in a dark room, but I wasn’t feeling nicey.
As soon as we landed and that sweet, beautiful ding went “ding,” I flipped my phone off airplane mode and texted my fiancée to tell her that I’d landed. But I didn’t scroll through TikTok. I didn’t scroll on anything. I kind of just sat there. None of the Chads raw-dogging flights on TikTok told me what kind of discipline this would require or how many layers deep I’d dig into my own psyche. It was like a five-and-a-half-hour therapy session. It didn’t feel like a mental break at all—and it also didn’t feel like a, you know, mental break. I was exhausted, but maybe a little renewed. And then the call for a return to the rot rang in my head, and as I reached for my phone, I thought, Never again. God, never again.
