Maybe we all just need to go for a walk...

You know when you complain about a serious life event to your mom and she hits you with some sh*t like, “maybe just get some fresh air and eat a banana, dear”?

Who knew that was actually sound advice?

And for Charlotte Ward, better known online as @hikingshawty, it’s not only counsel, but also the secret to her success. Because she has somehow built an entire online world out of that exact philosophy.

Every day, she takes a walk through the Yorkshire woods before dinner. Then she posts three photos of her walk, and one of her meal afterward. That’s it. No lengthy captions, brand sponsorships or calls to action.

Just the simple rhythm of movement and nourishment.

Since launching her account in April 2024, Charlotte Ward has grown to over 170,000 followers and built a community of nearly 200,000 called “today i walked…” 

It's a quiet (and wholesome) corner of X filled with photos of muddy paths, steaming mugs, and sunsets. People from all over the world have joined in, sharing their own daily walks and the small joys that follow. It’s refreshingly… uneventful.

And that’s exactly why it feels so good.

In the broader landscape of content, where everyone’s optimising, posting, performing, or experimenting with AI avatars, Charlotte’s account feels like a rebellion.

It’s the digital equivalent of turning your phone face-down and breathing - an extension of the great log off culture we’re witnessing as of late.

Her walks aren’t trying to teach you something or make you buy something or indoctrinate you to some polarised ideology.

They’re just there, small records of a day lived offline, then gently shared online. A digital resting point, a slow soft reminder to do the things that make you feel human, and the literal manifestation of “touch grass.”

It’s a return to a version of the internet that feels almost extinct: the pre-algorithm era and “posting ennui”, when social media wasn’t yet “content,” it was just communication.

When people posted burnt pancakes and blurry sunsets because they wanted to, not because they thought it would perform. In that sense, @hikingshawty isn’t even documenting nature, she’s documenting nostalgia.

Her popularity points to a bigger cultural appetite for what I’d call slow content, the kind that resists virality, that exists in real time, that reminds us of the world beyond our screens. It’s the digital parallel to the slow fashion or slow food movements: a pushback against disposability and excess. It’s indicative of the start of something gentler, a shift in how we use the internet, and I’ve spoken about this before.

This kind of soft content is a direct response to the digital fatigue we’re all high key experiencing.

We’ve been living through years of chaos posting, meta humour, and “brain rot” culture, and while that era had its fun, it’s also f*cking exhausting.

Even the most terminally online among us are craving something different now: sincerity, quiet, repetition. A slower pace.

Scrolling through “today I walked…” feels like being let in on a secret. Participating in it feels almost like the antidote to our collective burnout might not be logging off completely but simply posting differently. With less irony. Less speed. More intention.

What Charlotte has built acts as a collective exhale. And it’s a reminder that small rituals still matter, even - especially - online.

Maybe mom was onto something after all.

-Sophie Randell, Writer