Finding and Losing Humanity in the Air

Writing reboot (with paradoxes)

I’m traveling again. As I write this, I’m 30,000 feet up somewhere over the Sonoran Desert, headed in the wrong direction. I was in Tucson, AZ and I’m trying to get to San Antonio. But for some reason the best way to get there is to go to Los Angeles first.

I know that air travel has to take established routes; you don’t just go as the crow flies. And when I need to drive to the grocery store, which lies about a mile northeast of my house, I first start by driving west and then south, because that’s the way the street goes to get out of my housing development to the main roads. But as a percentage of the total distance (or time) traveled, that’s a pretty insignificant detour. Tucson to LAX is 500 miles west for a trip going east to San Antonio that should be 870 miles. I suppose that helps my frequent flier total, but doesn’t seem very efficient.

In the weeks to come, I’m going to start reflecting and writing about things like air travel and energy efficiency. In December I’ll be flying to COP28 in Dubai as a Christian observer of the important climate conversations and policy discussions that happen there. There is a bundle of paradoxes contained in that sentence and the reality it represents. I anticipate that much of my writing here will attempt to clarify and sort through those paradoxes.

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To get back on the wagon (or is the metaphor that I’m getting back off the wagon?) of regular newsletter writing, I’m going to try to articulate another paradox I’ve experienced on my current trip: I’ve been both impressed with and depressed by the humanity and lack thereof I’ve encountered on this trip.

I flew to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, which is sometimes billed as the busiest airport in the world. I had a long layover (another inefficiency of flying) and spent a good amount of time wandering around marveling at how many people were there. I know the statistics about the number of humans: we’re creeping up on 8 billion on the planet (plus there are 10 living in space at the moment!). But that is so impersonal. At the airport, you enter into other people’s stories, however briefly and insignificantly.

I posted something about this on my Facebook page, and a former student replied with a neologism from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with the entry for “sonder”:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

That captures really nicely the feeling I had of the incredible display of humanity at the airport. Then I got on the airplane.

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The second half of this paradox occurred in the soul-sucking experience of being packed into a 737 like cattle off to the slaughter, and not one fellow traveler could be distracted from their private worlds to say hello. It strikes me as really strange — and possibly morally suspect — to sit six inches from another person for four hours and never even acknowledge their existence.

I’m not a chatty guy by nature, and I certainly appreciate some me-time. But when someone sits down next to me, I will at least look at them and nod my head. If there is any openness to conversation, I’m happy to find out an interesting fact or two. The big guy who sat next to me never gave me that chance, and plugged in a device to the entertainment screen that bluetoothed to his wireless headphones (which I coveted a little bit) and proceeded to watch Fox News for four hours straight.

I started thinking about this article while flying, and briefly considered taking a photo of the scene to go with it. But I’m guessing that would have been morally suspect as well, so instead I asked ChatGPT to create “an artistic drawing of a person sitting in the middle seat of a crowded airplane feeling very alone because no one acknowledges each other’s existence.” I think it did pretty well in capturing that mood — though don’t look too closely at her hands, which AI has a curiously difficult time rendering well.

Of course this brings up one final paradox: I’m the father of an art school graduate who is very good at illustrations, but can’t get a full-time job creating them; and I’ve relied on AI to produce an image that is very fast and pretty good (and will only get better, I’m sure). Oh the paradoxes of being human.