Poem
Table of contents
Lock In
Like pretty much every other Millennial, I’ve been hearing the phrase ‘Lock In’ everywhere lately. A Gen Z slang word that’s completely escaped generational containment and out into wider culture.
It means something like to focus; to commit; to sort your life out. The idiom, to me anyways, feels mechanical—like something clicking into place. A latch, a seatbelt, a door bolt sliding home. There’s a sense of safety in it, but also finality. Once you’re locked in, you’ve decided.
Locking in isn’t a new idea, the runners I’ve known in my life have always used it to describe the stretch of time when the world drops away and instinct takes over . But as far as I am aware, the term for Gen Z has come from gaming, to ‘lock-in’ is the button y…
Poem
Table of contents
Lock In
Like pretty much every other Millennial, I’ve been hearing the phrase ‘Lock In’ everywhere lately. A Gen Z slang word that’s completely escaped generational containment and out into wider culture.
It means something like to focus; to commit; to sort your life out. The idiom, to me anyways, feels mechanical—like something clicking into place. A latch, a seatbelt, a door bolt sliding home. There’s a sense of safety in it, but also finality. Once you’re locked in, you’ve decided.
Locking in isn’t a new idea, the runners I’ve known in my life have always used it to describe the stretch of time when the world drops away and instinct takes over . But as far as I am aware, the term for Gen Z has come from gaming, to ‘lock-in’ is the button you press in lobby to confirm your load out in League of Legends. Once you click, that’s it. No going back. A whole generation learnt the sensation of commitment through a button.
I guess I first detected the memetic spread of the phrase around 2023? A post pandemic thing. The “When you gotta lock in” clips—cutting from chaos to a dead-serious face—made the phrase into a visual joke. And like with many things the joke became life advice.
People began declaring personal lock-ins: a week, a month, even a whole season of getting their shit together. And then there’s that Gen Z motivational guy on Instagram:
It’s all about cutting distractions, hitting the gym, cleaning their flats, rebuilding routines.
Personally when ever I hear a Gen-Z say they need to lock in I think about the pub. LOL. Doors closed, lights low, time turning fuzzy. Outside of the normal rules of engagement.
Gen Z’s Lock In is all about enclosure and discipline. But both, I think, speak to a sealed space of possibility. To ‘lock in’ is to draw a boundary around your attention, to make a small world. A self-imposed state of exception.
Not that Gen Z’s will agree, but I personally think the post pandemic moment that phrase ‘Lock in’ is having is related to demographics. The oldest members of Gen Z are now 28, approaching their 30s!
I know what this is like, I felt the need to ‘Lock In’ in my mid twenties too, I just didn’t have a name for it.
I had just been through a breakup that had hollowed me out, was working in a new job role and drowning in it. I was unravelling. Drinking too much, playing too much Xbox, and shooting twitter into my eyeballs. I was losing whole days. I remember walking home from the pub one night in the rain, completely soaked and full of dread about going into work the next day. And had one of those moments in my life when I knew something had to change. And the easiest and most obvious thing was Me.
So I made a deal with myself: one hour a day. No distractions. Just an hour spent doing something ‘deliberate’ after work.
Some nights I edited photos I had taken, and the first iteration of this website emerged during this period too. Other days I (unsuccessfully) tried to write, I made music in Renoise, learnt the basics of blender, unity etc, and did an online SQL course to try and catch up at work. My meditation started around this time too. The activity didn’t matter, but the hour did.
I started consuming what is now known as hustle culture media. The Tim Ferriss podcast etc. Though in my mind, back in 2008, it wasn’t grindset stuff, more inspirational. I changed the lock screen on my iPod to say Do Epic Shit. But I guess it helped, each time I saw it, I remembered the promise I’d made to myself.
Google photos says this was added to my gallery in 2010 lol
I deleted Facebook. Started listening to music again. Reading again. Used an app like Finch, but it was called UFYH. Saint Kondo’s magic book about tidying up hadn’t come out yet, but I did do the Discardia program. It didn’t happen all at once, but the compound effect of that daily hour was enormous. Over time small habits become a mechanism. A lock holds things in place, and focus, held long enough, begins to generate pressure…force, even. That force built a life, the one I’m largely still leading and experiencing now.
I’ve been thinking about that period a lot recently. Projects are bigger now, the external noise of social media louder, more insistant. I have a lot to do. An hour a day might not cut it in 2025.
I know there are some Gen-Z folks reading this, and I want to say that Locking-In isn’t about grinding or self-optimisation. It’s about meeting yourself honestly. About deciding who you’re becoming. Where are you going, and what things in this world deserve your attention.
Writing this mostly to remind myself what its like, as I have a lot of shit to do.
Forest Bed
My band is playing two sets at the Lamb Surbiton on the 20th of November. If you are around come down! We’re playing for about 2h in total!
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online writing, podcasts, and other creative projects. As a thank you, I’ll post a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
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Photo 365
274/2025/365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Multiple IRL meetings
- Couple of calls
- Looked at the manuscript for a thing I wrote for a magazine that never came out and put a whole bunch of the text back in and sent it off.
- Worked on SLOP MACHINES — need to update the GPT
- Took a post Berlin break for a few days.
Terminal Access
ADH has another entry ‘The Love Pyramid‘ in Escape Pod. Another entry in his Rocky Cornelius / capitalist surrealist short story series. Joining uncool hunter and concept shoppe soft-launch defender. Great short fiction. Check it out!
Rocky listened to this creative churn with waning interest. She’d birded writers rooms before, and unless you were part of the discussion, with the same half-built world spinning in your head, it got repetitive fast. The house thrummed and pattered with wind and freezing rain, lulling her toward drowsiness. As a rule, Rocky never allowed herself to sleep around clients, but these were unique circumstances. It had been a very trying day…
Dipping the Stacks
Hyper-Low American Church Aesthetics
What a guy told me is that in some communities they have no visible buttons because it would start a kind of aesthetic arms race. One guy gets silver buttons, one guy gets brass buttons, now it’s a thing.
Today, the European tech workforce stands at 3.5M. The vast majority — 2.9M — of those employees have joined over the past decade, and they have done so at a rate that puts Europe on par with the US’s more established scene.
When you’re a fan who hates the fandom
Fandom has never been unified, but only on the internet does it result in such embarrassment. Our interests are public-facing; we use them to signal status and to support our personal narratives. This is why it feels so important to make it clear where exactly our allegiances lie. I have my own monolithic personal brand to attend to, thank you very much. I can’t have that other one ruining my vibe.
Do LLMs have agency? What is agency, and where does it come from? When we get down to it, most questions of AI risk and benefit seem to be questions of agency. What can an AI actually do in the world? This is the bit that matters.
What’s Really Going on With Those Elaborate (Parent-Decorated) College Dorm Rooms?
If you watched any of Rushtok, you’ve seen them: lavishly decorated dorm rooms that look nothing like the spaces we occupied in our late teens. The beds are almost always “vaulted” to make space for storage underneath; the walls are often painted or covered in stick-on wallpaper. Other existing furniture (desks, dressers, wardrobes) are either covered with matching wallpaper/fabric or replaced with “better” items (where does the furniture go? Usually into a storage unit, paid for by the student’s parents).
Reading
Started reading Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira. Haven’t got very far in, but I can see why this is a modern classic. Spira has had such a massive influence on my life.
The New Eves – The New Eve Is Rising (LP)
I got an instagram advert for The New Eves and was immediately sold. It’s all a sort of anarcho-punk, pagan folk girl band?
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that TNE’s are “reclaiming english folk from the ashes” like some reviews do, as theres plenty of this sort of thing around. But they ARE very good. Cow Song of their new record, and their single mother are both very good exemplars of what they are all about.
Remember Kids:
clothes first, then books, papers, miscellaneous items (komono) and, lastly, sentimental items and keepsakes.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo
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