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.