TikTokers love a challenge, especially if it involves some sort of self-imposed hibernation period that will transform their lives and pay off in physical or financial success.
Currently, my feed is full of young people participating in “The Great Lock-In,” a three-month challenge that began in September and lasts through the end of the year. The goal is that participants enter January having already completed a set of goals and established certain habits, a jumpstart on “New Year, New Me.”
“Locking in” has become its own aesthetic. Videos under the #thegreatlockin and #lockingin hashtags feature Zoomers in sterile apartments wearing neutral workout clothes. They’re usually fixing healthy meals, walking on treadmills, and making lists in journals, complete with timestamps for each activity. There are inspirational slideshows set to rap songs. Others feature soundbites from iconic NBA players, like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan.
“It’s all about programming your mind to go hard for a sprint of time,” says influencer Tatiana Forbes in a TikTok video. “It’s meant to be this time where you put forth immense effort in some area of your life.”
It’s curious that locking in is a formal challenge. With origins in football and video-game culture, the term itself describes a period of hyperfocus in order to get stuff done. Online, locking in has become the ultimate Gen-Z mantra. People post about locking in at the gym, locking in at work, locking in to finish books, locking in to stay hydrated, and locking in to simply get through the day.
Of course, this collective desire for productivity and personal growth isn’t a new phenomenon. If Gen Z seems obsessed with assigning themselves a list of goals every few months, it’s probably because they witnessed or at least felt the residual effects of millennial hustle culture. Whereas millennials were reacting to their own generation’s misfortune — namely, the Great Recession — Zoomers are trying to shake off the brain rot of digital living in the pandemic and navigate the economic uncertainty brought on by artificial intelligence and the second Trump administration.
So what exactly is Gen Z locking in for, and how does the mantra manifest in their lives beyond TikTok? Is locking in an act of resistance, a coping mechanism, or just a performance? The answer is a bit of everything.
Gen Z wants to get off their phones — with the help of their phones
There are some obvious reasons why young people are craving focus. As much as locking in is about completing tasks, for some, it also means eliminating distractions. Tips for locking in on social media consistently include limiting screen time before bed. Some guidance is more extreme, encouraging users to “lock in and disappear” from social media with the expectation that they’ll eventually return as their improved self.
Even if the time away from their phones is temporary, many young people are aspiring to digital minimalism, a term popularized by Georgetown University professor and author Cal Newport. There’s now a popular subreddit devoted to promoting digital minimalism as a lifestyle, a way to recharge and live more intentionally.
Locking in isn’t that different from another concept coined by Newport: deep work. And it’s seemingly just the Gen Z version of a millennial-era idea. This, according to Newport, refers to “the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.” Newport says that, according to young people he’s talked to, locking in is “specifically a reaction to smartphones” and feeling like they’re “under the spell of digital attention purveyors.”
“It would be impossible for them to avoid noticing the degree to which these devices are taking them away from essentially every meaningful activity and manipulating their psychology,” Newport told me.
Recent studies reveal as much. Some 83 percent of Gen Z respondents said they have an unhealthy relationship with their phone, compared to 74 percent for other generations, according to the 2024 BePresent Digital Wellness Report. Similarly, 72 percent of Gen Z members surveyed in a 2025 study by Harmony Healthcare IT said that their mental health would improve if apps were “less addictive.” This year’s Pinterest Summer Trend Report found that the searches on the platform for “digital detox vision board” were trending up by 273 percent.
Roland Weihrach/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Still, the act of being active, for many, necessitates posting on TikTok or Instagram, which you might say is antithetical to the whole distraction-free concept of locking in. The locked-in lifestyle falls into a broader category of popular aspirational content online that, following the COVID-19 pandemic, revolves mainly around wellness and fitness. There’s social-media capital in looking like someone who is locked in.
So what is locking in actually inspiring young people to do with their lives? You’d think the point of getting off your phone would be to engage in human connection. But Gen Z has built a reputation for being the loneliest generation, with higher isolation rates than millennials and Gen X-ers, due in part to pandemic lockdowns and heavier reliance on social media. An uncertain economy is also keeping Gen Z stuck in a permanent cocoon.
Gen Z’s infinite pursuit of a better self
Locking in defies previous stereotypes we’ve held about Gen Z and its relationship to work. Gen Z is far from lazy — rather, studies have found that Gen Z has a different perspective on their professional lives than what grind culture taught millennials. Zoomers are more focused on creating work–life balance than climbing the corporate ladder, with only 6 percent saying that attaining a leadership position is a primary career goal, according to a 2025 Deloitte survey. A LinkedIn study also found that Gen Z was the most likely generation to reject jobs that don’t offer flexible work policies. But just because Gen Z isn’t as eager to devote themselves to a company doesn’t mean they aren’t busy.
“Gen Z isn’t more obsessed with productivity, but rather, obsessed with productivity in a different context,” says Kate Lindsay, co-founder of the newsletter Embedded and co-host of the podcast ICYMI. “Anecdotally, millennials enjoy being productive in relation to their career, whereas Gen Z is more focused on productivity as self-improvement — ‘locking in,’ ‘glowing up,’ etc.”
Lindsay sees locking in as a response to our resting state becoming “very passive.” “We’re scrolling, we’re binging, we’re bed-rotting,” she said. “Locking in is a way of kick-starting ourselves out of that and into a state that’s more active.”
This focus on self-improvement can be explained by a labor market that has become highly competitive for young people following the COVID-19 pandemic, including a declining number of entry-level jobs due to AI. A Bank of America Institute report found that over 13 percent of unemployed Americans this past July were “new entrants” or those without prior work experience, a group that “skews toward Gen Z.”
While “locking in” can appear like a shallow venture to some, it allows people to “feel in control of their lives in an economy that seemingly offers little security,” according to freelance writer and editor Chiara Wilkinson, who covered “The Great Lock In” in British Vogue.
“Many of the promises we were sold in the traditional narrative of growing up now seem out of reach for the vast majority of the population,” Wilkinson told me. “Factors like crippling student debt, rising house prices, inflation, and bleak graduate prospects — especially as AI threatens entry-level jobs — have left many Gen Z-ers unsatisfied with the current state of play.”
In its most radical interpretation, locking in seems like a way to fight back against tech companies that have shortened our attention spans and degraded our social lives. However, in its most common use, the locking-in trend shows Gen Z pursuing an endless cycle of self-improvement that doesn’t offer a fix to any of their generation’s problems.
You have to wonder: With all these rule-based attempts to improve their lives, is Gen Z factoring in fun?
“So much of Gen Z’s worldview is shaped by economic anxiety, and many can feel uneasy when they’re not being productive,” Wilkinson says. “The current economic structures might make ‘having fun’ difficult. Even ‘free’ fun, like going for a walk, or hanging at a mate’s house, comes with a degree of trade-off.”
For now, it seems like “locking in” is simply a way to get by, not necessarily a way to get better. We’ll know that life for Gen Z has finally improved when they don’t have to try as hard.
