‘Silent Walking’ trend has Gen Zers leaving iPhones at home to go for walks
If there’s one thing Gen Z knows how to do, it’s setting trends.
We’ve had “everything showers”, “bed rotting”, even “bare minimum Mondays” – which have been adopted to varying degrees of social media fanfare.
And now the latest Gen Z “movement” taking the youngest generation by storm is, ironically, not that new at all.
They call it “silent walking”, that is: going for a walk without their phones, or without listening to music, podcasts, or any sort of technological distraction.
Podcaster Mady Maio takes credit for “unintentionally starting a movement” that, she promises, will “change your life”.
In a video on Tiktok, she explains her boyfriend was the one who first challenged her to take a walk without any distractions.
“No AirPods, no podcasts, no music. Just me, myself, and I,” she said in the video, which has now gained almost 500,000 views.
“And at first I was like f**k no, my anxiety could never – which is probably what you’re thinking – but something within me was like let me just try it.”
Maio said the first two minutes of her walk were “mayhem”, until she hit a “flow state”, when “suddenly you can … hear yourself.”