Your Kid Is 'Aura Farming.' The Kid Who Started It Wasn't.

In July 2025, an 11-year-old boy named Rayyan Arkan Dikha stood on the narrow bow of a racing boat in Riau Province, Indonesia, wearing sunglasses and a Malay headcloth, and did a little dance. The boat was moving. He did not fall in. He blew kisses at the crowd.

The video went everywhere. Travis Kelce copied the dance. So did members of BTS and the soccer club Paris Saint-Germain. Kelce’s version alone got more than 14 million views.

Here is the part that got lost.

Rayyan was not goofing off. He was working. The race is called Pacu Jalur, a boat race his region has held for centuries. His spot on the bow has a name: Togak Luan.

The job is to hype up the rowers and signal the crowd when the boat pulls ahead. It takes real balance to do it on a moving boat, which is why kids often get the role instead of grown men. Rayyan was picked because he could do it.

The internet turned him into the mascot of looking cool on purpose. He was the one person in the frame who wasn’t.

The word your kid already knows

Your kid may call this “aura farming.” If you have a 9-year-old, you have probably heard the phrase shouted at a screen.

It’s a real word now, in the way words become real. Oxford put “aura farming” on its short list for Word of the Year 2025. More than 30,000 people voted. It lost to “rage bait.”

Oxford’s definition, posted on its own site , is this: “The cultivation of an impressive, attractive, or charismatic persona or public image by behaving or presenting oneself in a way intended subtly to convey an air of confidence, coolness, or mystique.”

Break that into kid language. “Aura” means presence. You have it or you don’t. “Farming” comes from video games, where you repeat a boring task over and over to stack up a resource. Put them together and you get grinding for cool.

Kids talk about “aura points” like a score. No app tracks them. It’s a joke currency.

And the rule of the game is that effort is illegal. Trying, if anyone sees you try, is cringe. You lose aura. So the goal is to look like you woke up this way.

Which is why the whole thing eats itself. The creators posting “how to farm aura” tutorials are, by their own rules, doing the least cool thing possible. Your kid knows this.

Half the trend is sincere and half of it is a joke about itself. If you treat it like a crisis, you will be wrong. Your kid will know it in about four seconds.

The experts mostly think it’s fine, and they have a point

I want to give this its full weight, because I think it’s true.

Dr. Michael Wetter, a clinical psychologist, told Yahoo that kids “are constantly evaluating social signals and figuring out where they stand among peers. This type of slang simply gives them a playful way to talk about social reputation and confidence.”

He goes further: “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be confident, carry yourself well, or develop a personal style. That kind of intentionality is a healthy part of building identity in adolescence.”

Agreed. Performing for status is not new and it is not a sin. My generation had letterman jackets. Before that, mixtapes. After that, MySpace top eight. Every kid who ever lived has practiced a walk.

So skip the “kids these days are fake” thing. It’s lazy and it’s false.

The honest difference isn’t that kids perform now. It’s that we used to get to stop. You went home and the audience went away.

The camera is in the house now. It’s in the car and at the dinner table and in their hand at 10pm. There’s less off-camera time to be a normal, unimpressive person. That’s the actual change.

The narrow place it can go wrong

Here’s the one thread I’d pull, and I’ll keep it small.

There’s research on two different reasons kids try. One is wanting to do well and be seen doing well. That one is fine. It tends to line up with kids feeling good.

The other is being scared of looking bad. That one lines up with anxiety. Same effort on the outside, opposite engine underneath. Research on those two motives has separated them for years.

So the worry was never ambition. The worry is a kid who has quietly decided that being seen struggling is worse than not trying.

Dr. Debra Kissen is a clinical psychologist who founded Light On Anxiety. She put it in a line I keep thinking about: “When calm becomes a performance rather than a skill, that’s when anxiety tends to slip in through the back door.”

That’s the whole concern in one sentence. Not that your kid wants to look calm. That looking calm becomes the skill instead of being calm.

There’s also decent evidence about what happens when a kid’s sense of worth gets welded to how they’re doing online. Researchers at the University of Houston ran three studies with 822 people and published the results in Cyberpsychology in 2024. When self-worth hangs on social media performance, it predicts trouble, and it does so on top of plain low self-esteem. Two different things.

Fair warning on that one: it’s about social media in general, not about aura farming. Nobody has studied aura farming. The phrase only turned up online around 2024. Most of this research is about teenagers, not 7-year-olds. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What Rayyan actually had

Go back to the boat.

The reason that video is good is not the sunglasses. It’s that a kid is doing something hard and making it look easy, because he can. He’d been chosen for a real job at his hometown’s race. He has the balance. He earned the spot.

In a July 2025 interview , he explained the dance: “I came up with the dance myself. It was just spontaneous.”

That’s not a strategy. That’s a kid who felt like it.

Millions of people have since copied the look of that. The sunglasses, the arms, the slow-motion. You can’t copy the part where you stand on a moving boat.

The gap between looking capable and being capable is the whole thing. It’s the same gap adults chase when they pay money to fake cauliflower ear instead of training. It’s the same gap behind confidence with nothing under it , which is a real risk for a kid who thinks they can handle themselves and can’t. And it’s the teenage version of the same story we wrote about when boys got sold looksmaxxing .

Rayyan was on the correct side of that gap. Everyone imitating him is on the other one.

Why a mat is useful here

I run a kids Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu program in Madison, WI , so take this with the appropriate salt. But there’s a reason I keep coming back to this.

You cannot aura farm in live sparring.

A kid can walk onto the mat with the best posture in the building. Sixty seconds later, a smaller kid has their back, and the mystique is gone. There is no camera angle. There’s just what you can do.

That sounds harsh. It isn’t. On the mat, visible effort is the point. Everybody is trying in front of everybody. A kid grinding to escape a bad spot is the most respected thing in the room, not the most embarrassing.

In our kids classes, roughly eight minutes of warmup and games, then technique, then drilling, then sparring, everyone is red-faced and trying. The floor drops out of the whole “don’t look like you care” rule, because caring is the only thing happening.

The belts work the same way. Nobody hands out a stripe for vibes . You get it when you can do the thing.

That’s what I want for a kid. Not that they stop being funny about aura, because the joke is good. I want them to have one room in their life where the cool-kid rule is turned off and effort is the currency. Then they can go back to the group chat and be as ironic as they want, because they’ll know the difference.

Three things to try this week

None of this requires a gym. Do these instead of a lecture.

1. Be bad at something in front of them. Out loud. Try a new recipe and burn it. Play a song badly. Narrate it: “I’m terrible at this and I’m going to keep going.” You’re showing them that a visible struggle isn’t a status wound. Kids read what you do, and they ignore what you say about it.

2. Ask about the joke, not the danger. Try “wait, explain aura farming to me, I don’t get it.” Then actually laugh. You’ll learn more in five minutes than in a month of watching them. You’ll also find out fast whether they think it’s funny or whether they think it’s the rules.

3. Watch for one specific thing, and only this one. Not screen time. Not slang. Watch for the moment your kid won’t ask for help on homework. Or shrugs off something that clearly stung. Or says “I didn’t even try” about a thing they cared about.

Kissen’s red flags all point the same direction: a kid using cool as armor. If that shows up two or three times in a week, it’s worth a quiet conversation in the car.

If you want the fourth thing, it’s the mat. Our Kids 2-Week Intro is $49 and comes with a free uniform. I’d rather your kid spend two weeks failing at armbars in front of their friends than another summer practicing a face.

Start the Kids 2-Week Intro for $49

Rayyan didn’t have aura. He had balance, a job, and the nerve to blow kisses while doing it. Those are different, and your kid can tell.