Nat Locke: Gen Z on TikTok are discovering ‘silent walking’, or, as us gen Xers call it, ‘walking’

There is a new trend on TikTok called — I’m not making this up — “silent walking”.

Now, you might assume this means you are creeping around in soft-soled shoes to avoid waking your partner when you get up earlier than them. Or you have memorised where the squeaky floorboards are, so you can sneak down the hallway to the toilet in the middle of the night.

But no. Silent walking is what us gen Xers call “walking”. That is, going for a walk without pumping tunes into your ears. It turns out that I am very much a trendsetter because I’ve been doing this for years. Wait till TikTok finds out about me.

As a dog owner, I am a frequent walker and, believe it or not, I can manage to do this without listening to Taylor Swift. Partly, this is because, for some reason, AirPods like to fall out of my ears. It’s possible my ear canals are misshapen or just sexily small. I can’t be sure.

Also, I prefer to walk in silence so I can hear what’s around me. Like murderers approaching, or buses careening out of control, or that annoying woman from the park whose dogs like to torment mine. All of these things are equally threatening, obviously, although only one of them has actually happened so far. I’ll leave you to guess which one.

I read an article about this trend, and the author really struggled with the notion of walking in silence because she discovered that without music or podcasts blasting into her ears, she started having thoughts of her own. Her brain started chattering incessantly and she didn’t necessarily like what it had to say.

Maybe this is the reactive effect of never giving your mind space to wander, so that when it finally gets a chance, it goes berserk for a while. I’m no psychological expert, obviously, but I’m pretty good at walking without getting overstimulated.

This is not a dig at gen Z, by the way. If I had been born in the last 20 years, with all of the technology available, I absolutely would be marvelling at the notion of going for a quiet walk, too.

For my generation, though, technology hit different. I remember being utterly delighted when I managed to pool all of my birthday money and buy myself a Walkman. Remember those? A personal tape player that you could carry around or attach to your belt with a handy clip so you could go rollerblading while playing an INXS cassingle. They were heady days. I never did actually go rollerblading, but it was nice to know I could’ve if I’d so desired.

I actually kept my Walkman for way longer than I should have, then gave it to a little girl who lived across the road because her class was doing a project on — I kid you not — things from the olden days. Yes, I listened to my Walkman while I was going to school in my horse and carriage. I really shook that bustle.

As confronting as that little exchange was, the kids of today would probably consider an iPod to be from the olden days, too.

Ah, those blissfully happy days downloading music onto one of those tiny little devices. Mine was an electric blue iPod mini, and I considered myself to be at the cutting edge of technological change.

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that there would come a time when absolutely everything I could ever need — and a whole lot that I definitely don’t need — would be contained in my phone. Incidentally, that iPod mini was from 2004 — less than 20 years ago — and it’s now basically a dinosaur. No wonder boomers are bewildered by rapid technological changes.

But I digress. Back to silent walking. The TikTokker (yes, it’s a job!) who invented silent walking, or at least coined the phrase, reckons it will give you the mental space for “the universe and your intuition to come to you through whispers”.

I’m not convinced I want the universe to whisper to me while I’m trying to take a gentle stroll through the neighbourhood, but I am a great proponent of taking in what’s around me.

I occasionally find myself literally stopping to smell the roses (there are a lot flowering in my suburb at the moment). In fact, nosily checking out other people’s gardens is genuinely one of life’s great pleasures. And if I was listening to a podcast, I wouldn’t be able to hear the homeowner yelling over their fence for me to sod off.

Life’s too short to miss those magical moments. So give silent walking a go. Just watch out for the whispering universe.