The fishing content trend on TikTok is something I did not expect to become part of my life. And yet here we are. I have watched an embarrassing number of quiet fishing videos. I have watched men and women in boats on still water at 6am doing nothing in particular except waiting with a kind of patience I genuinely do not possess in any other context, and I have found this deeply, specifically comforting.
I posted about it @vixenraefr because I was curious if anyone else had fallen into this particular corner of the algorithm. The response was: yes. Emphatically yes. There are apparently many of us, loud people, anxious people, city people, people whose lives are full to the edges, who have found something in watching other people sit quietly by water and wait. I'm not surprised anymore. I think I understand it now.
But I want to start with the one real fishing trip I've been on, because it contextualizes everything.
the one time I actually fished
I was eleven. My uncle, my aunt Deb's husband, a quiet man who was at peace with silence in a way that I didn't appreciate until much later, took me and my two cousins fishing at a pond about twenty minutes from their property. Early morning. Cold enough that I could see my breath. He had an old tackle box and four rods that were clearly not new and had the specific dignity of things that had been used well and often.
We sat there for three hours. Three hours. Eleven-year-old me was not built for this. I wanted to talk. I wanted something to happen. I kept checking whether my line was doing anything, which my uncle said was counterproductive, which seemed like the most absurd piece of advice I'd ever received. You're supposed to just... leave it? And wait? While nothing happens? For how long?
He said: as long as it takes. And then he said nothing else for about forty-five minutes.
I caught two small fish. He caught four. My cousins caught one each and lost at least two more. We released everything, catch and release was the rule, always. I can still remember the feeling of the fish in my hands before I put it back, this small cold living weight, and then it was in the water and gone and the whole thing had taken maybe four seconds total. You wait for hours for four seconds of that and then you wait more. I did not understand the appeal.
I understand it now. I'm thirty-something and I have been in a non-stop mode for the better part of a year, and I think about that pond sometimes. My uncle's truck. The cold. The specific quality of silence that exists near still water early in the morning before the world gets going. That silence is not empty. It's full of something that isn't noise.
what fishing content is actually doing
The fishing videos that hit me are not the ones about technique. Not the tournaments. Specifically the quiet, slow-moving ones, someone in a small boat, minimal talking if any, the sound of water and maybe wind and the occasional click of a reel. Sometimes a murmured commentary. Often nothing for long stretches.
These videos are doing something specific to my nervous system. Not the same thing as the fluffy animal content, that's a reset, a warmth injection, a cortisol drop through cute. The fishing content is something slower and more longitudinal. It's reorienting my sense of time. I watch five minutes of a fishing video and five minutes feels like a meaningful amount of time again. Not like a unit that should contain three tasks and two notifications and a scroll through something else. Just five minutes of water and waiting and whatever is happening under the surface.
I've been thinking about why this matters more now than it would have two years ago. The album rollout has been compressing my sense of time into something very small. Everything is immediate: the response to a post, the next metric, the next thing to address. The horizon of the work has gotten very short and very loud. The fishing content, improbably, is giving me back a longer horizon. Somebody is sitting by a lake where time moves differently, and for a few minutes I'm sitting there too.
stillness as medicine for a loud life
I make loud music. I am genuinely drawn to intensity, emotional intensity, sonic intensity, the intensity of a song that goes somewhere uncomfortable and asks you to stay there. My favorite records are not quiet records. My creative instinct is toward more, toward full, toward the moment where something breaks open.
And I've learned, slowly, the hard way, with the help of fishing content I didn't go looking for, that intensity only works in contrast. That the full sound hits harder when you've had silence first. That the emotional break-open lands harder when you know what baseline feels like. The loud needs the quiet. I need the quiet. Not as a preference, I've never been a particularly quiet person and I don't expect to become one, but as medicine. Regular, deliberate doses of nothing-happening.
The fishing content is a proxy for the real thing, which I should probably go find. Actual stillness near actual water. A Saturday morning where I don't have a phone or a session or a response to compose. I'm working on getting there. My aunt Deb has a farm with a pond. I haven't been back since, wait, I think the last time I was home properly was before the whole deconstruction era, which makes it complicated, but she and I are fine, she's always been the family member who asked questions first and judged later. She'd probably let me sit by her pond without asking too many things.
That's the plan, at some point. Go sit by a real pond. Leave the phone in the car. Wait for something to happen or not happen, either of which is fine.
why silence is hard and why it's worth it
I am bad at silence. Not in a loud-personality way, I can be quiet in company. I mean I am bad at tolerating internal silence. My brain defaults to production. To planning. To reviewing. To the running list of what needs doing and what hasn't been done and what should have been done differently. Even when I'm not actively working, the background process keeps running, and it is genuinely loud in there.
The fishing content interrupts that loop not by replacing it with something else interesting, it's not interesting in the conventional sense, nothing is happening, but by modeling a different relationship with time and attention. The person on the water has one task: be here, hold the rod, wait. That's all. Everything else is suspended. Watching that, for some reason, gives my brain permission to suspend some of its own background noise. Even briefly. Even incompletely. Even just long enough to take a real breath.
I've started building in small versions of this deliberately. Ten minutes in the morning before I open anything, just coffee and window and whatever the street is doing. It's not meditation, I've tried meditation and I am genuinely terrible at it. It's just ten minutes of low-stimulation presence. I think of it as the practice version of fishing. Same basic principle: be here, wait, let the thing come or not come.
The album is doing what it's doing in the world, and I'm grateful every day for that. But I'm also aware that I can't sustain indefinite intensity without paying a price, and the price shows up in my work before it shows up anywhere else. A depleted person makes depleted art. Fishing content, improbably, is part of my quality-control system. My uncle, a quiet man who was good at silence, would probably find this outcome funny. I think he'd be glad about it too.
I've started paying attention to the specific quality of silence in the fishing videos versus other kinds of silence-adjacent content, ASMR, meditation guidance, sleep sounds, the various genres that are explicitly marketed as calming. What the fishing content has that the others often don't: the silence is incidental. Nobody is fishing to be calming. They're fishing to fish. The tranquility is a byproduct of the activity, not the point of it. And I find incidental peace much more believable and therefore more useful than manufactured peace. When someone sits by a lake in the early morning because that's where the fish are, and the water is still and the light is low and nothing is happening yet, that's real. That's the actual texture of quiet mornings near water. You can feel the difference between that and a soundscape track engineered to relax you in seventeen minutes.
The specific fishing videos that loop most in my head are the early-morning ones, before full light, the camera slightly cold-looking, someone's breath visible in the air. Everything about those videos reminds me of things my body knew before my adult life convinced me there was no time for them: that mornings can be slow. That watching water is a complete activity. That waiting for something is not the same as wasting time. I've been running on urgency for so long that the fishing content sometimes feels almost like grief, not sad grief, but the ache of recognizing something you haven't been back to in too long. I'm going to find my way back. Probably aunt Deb's pond. Probably soon.
Follow the fishing content. Go find the quiet. I'll be here doing both, poorly but earnestly, until I get to sit by a real pond again.