Day: September 9, 2025

It’s fall, buckos. Are you going to rot your way through December, or are you locking in?

Across social media, “The Great Lock In” has begun. From September to the end of the year, participants say they are walking five miles every day in weighted vests. They’re sleeping eight hours a night. They’re drinking several liters of water a day. They’re deactivating Instagram, but not before posting their lengthy lists on how to lock in on Instagram.

What it means to go locked-in mode varies wildly — there is a lock-in for every key, it seems. The Great Lock In can include tackling financial goals, finding love, building community, and, perhaps more than anything, achieving maximum wellness. For women on TikTok, it’s a time to journal and set intentions for self-improvement; for men on X, it’s about maxing out on protein, skipping sugar, and taking cold showers. “No excuses, just grind,” a rule posted to X states. In a culture obsessed with improvement, productivity hacks, and ideal morning routines, locking in is the latest cult of self-upgrade.

Goodbye to the anti-work, lazy girl era or a summer of hedonism, where day drinking is followed by nightly doomscrolling through brain rot and AI slop. To close out a year marked by a herky-jerky economy, doom and gloom news cycles, and an increasing focus on the loneliness epidemic, people are committing to a 121-day-long mindful, self improvement journey that’s part-75 Hard, part-preamble to a New Year’s resolution, part back-to-school energy (nostalgically so for those who graduated long ago), and ultimately the latest iteration of optimization culture. Whatever end game people have in mind, the process is a way to take control back from a chaotic world.

Kadie Glenn is among the locked-in corps. The 28-year-old London-based personal consultant had a bad start to her 2025. She tells me she went through a breakup and moved, and her aspirational goals for the year were hard to reach. Instead, Glenn says, she’s focusing on smaller changes across shorter chunks of time, first by breaking down her life into certain areas, like health, career, or relationships, and then focusing on the areas that need the most work rather than a full overhaul of her life. Right now, her big goal to run a half marathon in early 2026, but she’s starting with committing to regular runs and scaling up for training.

“People have just arrived at that point wanting to refuel, wanting to get something out of 2025 other than what it has been,” says Glenn, who posted about the Great Lock In and then started Instagram chats for her followers to discuss their goals and team up. “People want to reframe the narrative. People want to start again.”

The worse the old chapter was, the more you need the fresh start.Katy Milkman

Success for self-improvement campaigns is mixed. A YouGov poll found that in 2020 about a quarter of people in the US made New Year’s resolutions, and around half kept some of their resolutions, while around a third stuck to them all. Swedish researchers found in a 2020 study that New Year’s resolutions that seek to approach a goal rather than avoid a habit (for example, starting a gym routine versus quitting sugary snacks) tend to be more successful, as do people who receive support in achieving their goals.

But, as Katy Milkman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School reminds me, it’s hard to change, and you won’t change at all if you don’t at least start trying. Milkman, who wrote the book “How to Change,” says the Great Lock In is an example of the “fresh start effect.” It’s the idea that a birthday, new year, or even the start to a new month or week can bring the potential to start new habits. And if the season of locking in seems arbitrarily tied to September, “every fresh start is socially constructed,” she says. But those fresh starts can come when people feel stuck and fed up with the current version of their lives. “The worse the old chapter was, the more you need the fresh start.”

Unlike the strict 75 Hard program (a challenge pulled from a 2020 self-help book of the same name that involves changing your diet, fitness regimen, and reading daily), the Great Lock In is a grassroots social media movement that began bubbling up on social media in August. It’s a continuation or rebrand of last year’s Winter Arc, which last fall encouraged people to use chilly months to start chiseling away at the parts of themselves they didn’t like and emerge as their best self. The Great Lock In also follows years of people “locking in” and putting all of their energy onto various tasks, like studying or cleaning, as they arise. It’s part of the grindset mentality focused on building wealth and success, a more personalized and flexible version of the 9-9-6 (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week). In a world where distractions are ever present on our phones, a longer lock in period to tackle a range of goals is resonating with Gen Z — even for those “born to dilly dally, forced to lock in.”

Racha Yessouf, a 26-year-old wellness content creator in London, has started working on what she deems the “hot girl edition” of the Great Lock In. Her self-imposed rules include waking up at 5 a.m., drinking lots of water, doing regular skin and hair care, eating lots of protein, and going to bed by 9 p.m. “It’s not about reinventing yourself in the way New Year’s resolutions tend to be,” Yessouf says (she was already working out and had a beauty regimen). “It’s more about focusing on consistency and going into the new year with the momentum already built instead of guilt.”

Tatiana Forbes has three goals she’s locking in on: decluttering her house, getting her Instagram account to 100,000 followers, and running two marathons this fall. The 31-year-old Atlanta-based leadership development coach says she did the 75 Hard challenge previously, and the locking in movement feels like a way to wellness where “you’re creating your own rules and own journey,” and that means tackling more than just diet and exercise. “A lot of us are addicted to our phones, or are overwhelmed by the new beauty standards that are pushed to us through the media,” she says. “This challenge is giving you time to take your power back and focus on what you want to focus on and shut out the noise for a little bit.”

Online challenges come and go. The Great Lock In might fade from FYPs before October, with lists of rules abandoned in notes apps on phones one by one. But for those who are really committed to lock in, there’s never a better time to make a fresh start than right now.

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Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

This article is part of “The Business of Sports,” a series on the teams, leagues, and brands turning competition into big business.

We’re in the midst of a golf renaissance in the United States. Americans played a record 545 million rounds in 2025, according to the National Golf Foundation. Gen Z is picking up on what was long considered an old-money, old-people sport. The golf polo has become a status symbol among a certain type of striving guy. Golf courses and clubs are capitalizing on the links revival in a number of ways, and one of the most profitable is their merch. They know some of their logos are a hot commodity among those in the know, and the more exclusive, the better. They’re catering to golfers who are seeking a lovely 18-hole day and looking to grab a collectible or 10 to commemorate it.

“It’s a little trophy,” says Greg Nathan, the president and CEO of the National Golf Foundation, a trade association for the golf business. And a lucrative one at that.

Historically, a golf course’s pro — the person who manages much of the facility and provides lessons — typically owned and ran its retail operation, hence calling it a “pro shop.” Revenue from the store was part of the pro’s compensation. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, a lot of golf courses were built around the US, and the market became oversupplied by the time the Great Recession hit, adding to the economic turmoil. So some clubs went looking for ways to make money.

Over the past couple of decades, courses have taken over the pro shops themselves and brought in retail professionals to handle the business of selling their stuff. Even clubs that weren’t hurting picked up on how lucrative the business is. The Association of Golf Merchandisers estimates golf shops generate annual sales of over $1 billion a year.

The real juice, clout-wise, is with the top 500 or so private clubs and resorts.

“Today, with everything being so much driven by online shopping, having a physical shop at a club, I think, still provides that hands-on, touchy-feely experience that people enjoy,” says Patrick Casey, the president of the Association of Golf Merchandisers and the founder of Casey’s Club Consulting.

Retail operations aren’t the end-all, be-all of golf club revenue. Membership dues, daily fees, food, beverage, and cart fees all rank above it, says Jeffrey Davis, the managing director of Fairway Advisors, a golf course brokerage and advisory firm. But it doesn’t mean they’re not important, from a sales perspective and a marketing one.

“People that are building new courses today are cognizant of their logo and the impact it would have on spreading the word about the club,” he says. For clubs and courses that don’t put time and energy into merchandise, it can be a “missed opportunity.” And some clubs that have changed logos have gone back to their original ones, to reclaim some historical mystique.

But as more courses get in on the merch game, gear from all of them is not created equal. There are some 16,000 golf courses in the United States, and the real juice, clout-wise, is with the top 500 or so private clubs and resorts.

“Those 500 courses, they do some very serious revenue because it’s very logo-driven,” Nathan says.

It’s like going to Disney.

When golf courses renovate — as many of them are doing right now — they often look at the internal facilities, too, including their shops. A well-appointed shop is a place for members at private clubs to pick up gear for themselves (often at a friendly price) and show off to their guests, who can also pick up stuff (at a not-as-friendly price). The markups on branded items and general gear can be quite large, given how exclusive the logos are and the fact that the customer is a little trapped. If you forgot golf balls for the day, the ones at the course are going to cost you.

As logo collecting has become more of a thing among golfers, clubs are figuring out new ways to capitalize. For example, some are leaning into e-commerce so that they don’t have to stock all of their merchandise, and if people come to play for a day and don’t have time for shopping, they can pick up gear online. (This may open up some breaches of the unwritten rule that people can’t wear logos of courses they haven’t played, but we’ll leave that for another day.) For the courses and clubs that do merch right, “it’s like found money,” Davis says.

“It’s a very positive time for the golf industry right now,” Nathan says. Logo-mania is part of it. The more popular the sport becomes, the more the merch matters — at least for those in the know. “It’s like going to Disney,” he says. “You’re going to get some souvenirs.”

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Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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