If there’s one thing that I’m always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I’m only now starting to hear about the so-called “Great Lock In of 2025.”
This idea began circulating on TikTok over the summer. Borrowing the term ‘lock in’, which is Gen Z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal, this challenge asks people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the New Year. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” explained one TikTok influencer, quoted recently in a Times article about the trend.
Listeners of my podcast know that I’m a fan of the strategy of dedicating the fall to making major changes in your life. My episode on this topic, How to Reinvent Your Life in 4 Months, which I originally aired in 2023 and re-aired this past summer, is among my most popular – boasting nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube.
To me, however, the more significant news contained in this trend is the generalized concept of ‘lock in’, which has become so popular among Gen Z that the American Dialect Society voted it the “most useful” term of 2024.
Critically, ‘lock in’ seems to have been defined in reaction to smartphones. “I think that we live in an era where it’s very easy to be distracted and that we’re on our phones a lot,” explained language science professor Kelly Elizabeth Wright, in the Times. “‘Lock in’ really came up in these last couple years, where people are saying, like, ‘I have to make myself focus. I have to get into a state where I am free from distraction to accomplish, essentially, anything.’”
This matters because defining positive alternatives to negative habits is an effective way to reduce them.
When I first published Deep Work, which centers on the importance of undistracted focus in your professional life, people already knew that spending their days frantically checking email probably wasn’t good. They only felt motivated to change, however, when presented with a positive alternative.
Ideas like ‘locking in’ might provide a similar influence for Gen Z’s collective smartphone addiction. It’s one thing to be told again and again that your devices are bad, but it’s another to experience a clear vision of the good that’s possible once you put them away. When you experience life in its full analog richness, the allure of the digital diminishes.
The irony of the Great Lock In of 2025, of course, is that it started on TikTok – the ultimate digital distractor. My hope is that by the New Year, this challenge will no longer be trending; not because people gave up, but because they’re not online enough anymore to talk about it.
