The internet can be an unpredictable place. Fads, trends, and inside jokes (67, anyone?) rise and fall with an impressive warp speed. The one thing you can always count on, however, is that, no matter what time of year it is, a productivity, wellness or self-improvement movement of some sort will have legions of eager peopleadopters in a chokehold.

This autumn, the internet has deemed the final stretch of the year as the time for “locking in”. But what does that look like, exactly? A quick TikTok search for the term yields videos of people on treadmills, in front of stacks of books and in kitchens meal-prepping. This lifestyle-improvement-core represents the aesthetic of “The Great Lock In”, a new re-purposed framing for level-ing up your life. As some warn, though, it might not be pretty. 

“Do not listen to those on the internet who tell you this is going to be rainbows and butterflies,” creator Surell Walker cautioned in a video describing the challenge. “When you decide to ‘lock in’ and go all in on yourself, it will be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done… Your old self is going to fight you.”

Intended for those looking to finish the year strong, The Great Lock In is a social media trend that encourages people to “lock in” on their goals from September 1 to New Year’s. While it may sound similar to last year’s “winter arc” craze, or the “75 Hard” challenge, the premise of this challenge is much vaguer, and if anything, a bit meandering: participants are prompted to create routines and regimens that will enhance any and all areas of their life they’ve been meaning to improve, whether that’s their health, career or finances. Some participants are prioritising daily journaling and meditation; others are focused on improving their sleep schedule and reducing their screentime. The open-endedness, it seems, is part of the trend’s appeal.

Alex Hanan, a 25-year-old content creator and fitness instructor based in New York City, had already intended to spend the end of year focusing on herself, rather than waiting until the New Year. The Great Lock In, however, gave her an added boost of motivation. “I think for a lot of people, especially if you're not someone whose day-to-day routine already involves health and wellness, it's a good way to challenge yourself and make it a short-term challenge,” she says. “I think it's more digestible when you have a label on something.” 

The power of labelling something is the allure of many internet fads that aren’t particularly unique, but still gain traction by virtue of having a clicky name. Thus, language becomes as influential of a driving force as the premise of the trend itself. The term “lock in”, after all, has felt inescapable as of late. Google search data shows that interest in the phrase began to spike sharply this past August, while the American Dialect Society voted it the most useful term of 2024 (beating “bedrot,” “cooked” and “crash out”).

Sade Adeyina, a 36-year-old graphic designer based in Philadelphia, was also wooed by this language. “The Great LockIn [as a label] just seemed very dramatic and very epic,” she says. After experiencing a mentally and emotionally taxing few months, Adeyina felt that the movement came at the perfect time for her. Since the challenge began, she’s been focused on regulating her nervous system, working towards financial freedom, and simply getting out of bed in the morning, which is something she struggled to do before. And, like other internet-driven challenges, Adeyina says the companionship is also part of the appeal: “I love the fact that it feels communal." 

They’ve really managed to reframe this structural collapse as a personal problem, which is solvable only through personal output... The problem isn’t individual effort, it’s really systemic failure

Though camaraderie is of course a powerful tool, experts like Dr Gloria Mark, a psychology professor and author of the book Attention Span, recognise that there can be downsides to having a constant front-row seat to the goal-pursuing of others. “Before social media, you might have had a friend who you talked with about the goals you were setting,” says Mark. “But now we're seeing it at scale, with hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Some people might post their failures, but a lot of people are posting successes. It's like this tsunami that's coming at people.” 

Madison Utendahl, who publishes the burnout-focused newsletter Burnt, says that there is privilege to pursuing self-improvement. As such, our current obsession with self-optimisation may actually be a byproduct of the current chaotic state of the world. “Out of all the trends that exist, one that encourages people to double down on their goals, I think is a positive thing,” says Utendahl. “But a lot of people can't ‘lock in’ on their goals because they're really stressed out about finding a job or are not financially able to. It must be really stressful to witness this pressure to lock in while you're thinking, ‘How am I going to pay my bills?’”

Others have also made the connection between trends like the great lock in and external societal factors. In one post, TikTok user Georgia Ka hypothesises that this challenge is due to “an erosion of the middle”, arguing that the dwindling of America’s middle class is at least in part to blame for our current obsession with optimisation. She connects this phenomenon to sociologist Émile Durkheim's concept of anomie, which suggests that rapid structural collapses in society can lead to psychological consequences. This checks out given that, in the United States at least, a structural collapse feels imminent, if not already present; roughly 7.4 million Americans are currently unemployed, and depression rates in the country continue to rise. 

“They’ve really managed to reframe this structural collapse as a personal problem, which is solvable only through personal output,” Ka muses in her video. “Even though, for a lot of people, the faster that your sprint, the more the goal posts are going to move. The problem isn’t individual effort, it’s really systemic failure.”

In a world that feels increasingly volatile, there is a renewed attraction to regulating, and even micro-managing, whatever factors of our lives that we can. When the systems that were meant to rule our lives begin to crumble, what other choice do people have but to turn inwards? 

“The economy, the job market, literally the climate – anything you could think of is seemingly up for grabs at all times,” says Utendahl. “So, I do think it makes complete sense that we are ‘locking in’ and finding these modalities of control.”