An ancient habit now becoming a TikTok trend

Two teenagers stood facing each other, phones pointed at them from every angle. One dropped into a pose lifted straight from an anime villain’s final battle stance. The other answered with Cristiano Ronaldo’s “Siuuu” leap, exaggerated to parody.

The crowd roared. Nobody threw a punch. Nobody kept score on paper. Yet somehow, everyone present knew exactly who had won.

That was the scene in a Mexico City plaza.

No judges, no real rules, and no injuries. So, what, exactly, were they competing for?

Welcome to an “Aura Battle” — a strange sporting spectacle that nobody quite planned to invent. At first glance, it looks like another fleeting piece of internet culture escaping the digital world and spilling into public life.

Aura farming is an urban term for doing something effortlessly cool without appearing to try. The term emerged online in 2024, with “farming” borrowed from the repetitive grind of collecting points in video games.

It found global fame through Rayyan Arkan Dikha, an 11-year-old Indonesian boy filmed dancing on the bow of a racing boat during the Pacu Jalur festival. The boy had no idea what he had set in motion.

As the videos spread, commenters and other social media users began remarking on the extraordinary amount of “aura” Dikha appeared to possess.

By mid-2026, the concept had drifted far from its online origins into something almost unrecognisable: teenagers gathering in real public squares to compete for an entirely imaginary currency called “Aura.”

Reports from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and even Costa Rica have documented similar scenes.

Crowds packed into parks. Young competitors took turns in Torreón. A frog costume appeared at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts. In Argentina, prize money was reportedly offered for displays of “infinite aura”.

One report even described these gatherings as “battles” spreading across the continent — a description that, taken literally, suggests something closer to street conflict than a dance-off. But that framing deserves scrutiny.

Accounts of these events describe gatherings that are almost entirely free of aggression. There are no judges, no formal rulebook, and no violence. Two people take turns performing poses, gestures, and viral references while a crowd reacts.

The crowd’s reaction determines who comes out on top. The prize is often little more than the satisfaction of winning.

So why do people keep showing up if nobody is fighting and nobody is really winning?

It may be because the “battle” is less a competition than a form of theatre.

Uvitinho, an organiser in Brazil, told CNN that the format brought together more than 200 people from different social backgrounds who simply played together and made friends — from shy participants to extroverts and everyone in between.

A young Argentine competitor offered an equally simple explanation for his participation: he came for the fun.

Another participant turned up dressed as a sheikh, carrying a briefcase stuffed with fake Brazilian reais, treating the entire event as theatre rather than genuine competition.

The reaction online has not been entirely warm, either. Clips of the battles have drawn plenty of mockery, particularly over the deliberately absurd poses.

Experts have compared that reaction to the derision once aimed at Rachael Louise Gunn, better known as Raygun, the Australian former academic and competitive breakdancer whose unconventional Olympic routine went viral partly because of the mockery surrounding it.

The comparison points to something simple: being laughed at online does not necessarily stop a phenomenon from growing. In the case of aura battles, the gatherings appear to be expanding.

But if this is not a fight, and not really a sport in any conventional sense, what is it?

Frederick Luis Aldama, a Humanities professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told CNN that Latin America has a long history of the plaza, the courtyard and the gathering in public parks.

Long before smartphones, the town square functioned as a central stage of youth social life — a place where young people walked in loops specifically to be seen, evaluated and courted by their peers.

Dressing well, walking a certain way and catching the right eye at the right moment were not incidental behaviours. They were deliberate performances of status and charm, played out in full public view, generation after generation.

In essence, it was a slower, unfilmed version of what is now happening with phones held aloft.

Perhaps aura farming is not simply an American export that Latin America happened to adopt with unusual enthusiasm. Meeting in the town square, showing off a little, making people laugh and building friendships in person may have been an old habit long before TikTok gave it a name.

The internet did not necessarily invent the behaviour. It gave it a new vocabulary — and a camera.

That possibility changes the shape of the story.

The prevailing narrative treats aura farming as a novelty escaping its digital habitat, a trend travelling outward from social media into the physical world. A more compelling interpretation is that the physical world was the origin point all along, with social media merely providing new packaging for something that has long belonged to the courtyard and the square.

It could also explain a detail that puzzles outsiders more than it should: out of thousands of trends competing for attention online each week, why has this one taken root so deeply?

Novelty alone rarely produces six-year-olds competing in organised events within weeks or crowds large enough to require informal organisers in cities such as Buenos Aires.

Novelty fades quickly. Tradition, by contrast, can resurface when it finds a convenient excuse.

Yet there is an important gap in the argument. Nobody appears to have established whether the aura battle is genuinely a descendant of the plaza-courtship tradition or simply an appealing coincidence given an academic explanation.

That gap is precisely what makes the question more interesting.

Somewhere between a TikTok hashtag and a centuries-old evening stroll through a town square may lie the explanation for why teenagers across an entire continent suddenly began competing for something as intangible as aura.

For now, whether that explanation holds up remains unwritten.