I offer the term “tic-toffed” - a mix of feeling both bemusement and disparagement at what the stupid kids are doing these days, without really caring enough to pay much attention to it.
Yet another Thik-Tok nonsense buzzword.
Let me construct outterested for you. Or offterested. Or exterested. Or mehterested. There’s plenty of prefixes to play around if you really want to.
And just as the OP has teased us with a sexually ambiguous term those DickDokers just like to give outrageous names to stupid trends to increase trendability. And it works, sort of. For a month or two. I mean, who remembers last years “challenges”?
Oh, I agree with you that “disinterested” properly / traditionally means affirmatively neutral: an observer with no stake in the outcome.
But of course “dis-” is used like “anti-” in many other contexts, such as “distasteful”.
So I could imagine people beginning to use “dis-interested” to mean “anti-interested”, affirmatively repulsed, etc. While “uninterested” is reserved for “meh; I simply don’t care about [whatever]”
I for one would rather leave “disinterested” undisturbed in its neutral observer meaning.
But in an era where everyone is expected to have an opinion, or at least a pro/con reaction, to everything, regardless of their knowledge of it, a word like “anti-interested” would be very useful. So IMO we English speakers collectively are in the process now of inventing that word, whatever it turns out to be.
Moderating:
Enough talk about what word exactly matches your level of interest in this practice. Let’s stop the hijack and return to, um, sitting still without checking the dope on airplanes.
Yep this. On the one hand, it’s good for us occasionally to be under-stimulated and take time to think about things or just zone out.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s healthy as a thing that people are challenging themselves to do. There’s no reason not to at least have snacks, or a nap if you get sleepy.
I’d also add that for me personally, zoning out is a thing I will do anyway even with the in-flight movies, food and announcements. It might be my age…now I’m middle-age-ish, a daytime nap is an easy thing to achieve.
So a movie on a tiny screen and the unchanging engine noise will put me to sleep, like it or not.
I am jealous of those of you who can sleep on an airplane. On an overnight flight, if i cover my eyes and take melatonin, i might doze slightly. I try very hard to at least zone out for a few hours.
But i get up and use the toilet (and walk up and down the aisle) as often as i can without being too rude, and i spend some extra time pacing or walking when I’m up. I try to at least tense and relax my leg muscles from time to time. I’m naturally fidgety and change my position frequently even in a spacious comfy chair in my living room. And i always bring a book and some offline phone games, and often bring some downloaded movies or tv shows.
I generally can’t NOT sleep on a plane, or in fact in any transportation I’m not controlling.
As a kid I was very easily motion-sick (still am, truthfully) and so any time we flew anywhere or took a long drive I was given Dramamine. I’ve essentially been pre-programmed to sleep in moving vehicles.
If I’m going on a trip in a friend’s car I can make myself stay awake, but it’s generally an effort. Doesn’t matter so much on trips with my husband, we trade places every 2 hrs or so and the expectation is that the non-driver will snooze.
There is a reason why I always get the aisle seat. I’m up going to the bathroom frequently and don’t want to bother anyone. My wife gets the opposite aisle seat. I usually can’t sleep. Being able to download movies and tv episodes to my phone has been a godsend for flying. It’s an invention on par with the polio vaccine.
I’ve known two people to develop blood clots on long flights. One had a clot in each lung and is lucky to be alive. The other died of a clot the night after a long flight. I get up at least every two hours and do squats in the aisle, stay hydrated, and do arm and leg isometrics whenever I think of it. For better or worse, I can no longer sleep on a plane as I’ve had vertigo since surgery/anesthesia and chemo, so if my head drops, I have a vertigo attack.
There’s no way that I could “rawdog” on a flight and, since the best my wife and I can do is bulkhead seats or worse (and I’m 6’3") any flying is an exercise in doing whatever it takes to tolerate it. And for me that means a few drinks (no buzz and not drunk - just a few to ease the discomfort or whatever), my iPod with heavy metal blasting away, and sleep if and when possible.
Otherwise I loathe flying commercially.
The fact that this rawdogging is performative and done for social media undermines their claims of it being a meditative act. Real rawdogging: not getting off the plane to brag online that you sat still.
Sure, forcing yourself not to move, sleep, hydrate or go to the bathroom while breathing recirculated air for hours isn’t particularly good for you.
That isn’t the same thing as forgoing on zoning out on streaming media or eating crappy airline food.
I guess like everything, people need to come up with a stupid name for stuff we used to call “life before the internet”.
Though before the internet, the airlines provided magazines and people brought their own magazines or books to read. So we weren’t starved for things to do. Also, I remember when the same movie was shown to everyone on a screen at the front of the plane. Sometimes they charged for the headphones and, depending on the particular movie, I wouldn’t pay for it.
A minor nitpick: the air on a commercial passenger plane gets changed out a lot. HVAC professionals refer to an “air changes per hour” specification to describe how often the volume of an enclosed space gets swapped out with fresh outside air. The recommendation depends on the density of occupancy; It’s not just about germs, but also about the buildup of CO2 and humidity. For an office setting, they might spec 3 air changes per hour, but for a passenger jet, which has a much higher population density, it’s reportedly on the order of 15-20 air changes per hour.
Having said that, yes, the air is bone-dry. This means your respiratory tract has to fully humidify each inhaled breath, and that moisture from your body gets expelled when you exhale. You definitely want to hydrate more than you would sitting at home.
FWIW this is the tweet (from 2022) that originated the concept of “rawdogging” a flight:
It’s been circulating a while: it gets posted to Reddit fairly often.
Before covid, i discovered that wearing a surgical mask on airplanes kept me from getting dehydrated. I had most of a case of masks in my cupboard at the start of the pandemic because i bought them for air travel.
Wearing a mask works way better than drinking lots of water, because it prevents my throat and lungs from drying out in the first place. And it doesn’t make me spend the flight getting up to pee, either.
My travel-sized CPAP doesn’t use a water tank, it uses cartridges coated with a material that absorbs moisture from your exhaled air and gives it to the dry incoming air. A plain old mask helps just because it’s got lots of surface area and it’s inherently slightly cooler than your freshly exhaled breath (which means it will gather at least some condensate from your exhaled breath), but these chemically treated cartridges (especially the “Plus” rated ones) really do great. For my last few flights to/from Japan (12-13 hours each way), I’ve started using this thing whenever I’m not eating/drinking/talking, and it makes a fantastic difference in how I feel during the flight.
I do still drink plenty of water. Getting up to pee during long flights is important:
- It’s a useful sign that you’re well hydrated, and
- getting up to move around, stretch, and get blood flowing all over your body is a good thing.
I’m traveling to Ireland from Pittsburgh on Monday. Lots of good advice here. I always download stuff on my phone/kindle and take a small book for these long journeys but end up just sitting there in a stupor most of the time.
Admission, on long flights, i get up and “go to the bathroom” whether or not i need to pee. Because it’s good for you to move around, and i feel better if i do it. But if i don’t need to pee, i can time my trips for when my seat mates aren’t sleeping, etc.