The Intersection of Flying and Death is Efficiency
I was staring out the window of a 737, riding winds my skin will never feel somewhere East of Charlotte, North Carolina when I realized that being good at flying is something like being good at death. And that I am good at flying.
I have favorite airports. I can tell you the 21C and 21D are the best value seats on a 737. I know to book American, Delta, or United on Thursday, Monday, or Sunday flights so you can watch football live. I know precisely which two brands of Target shorts will guarantee being groped by TSA. I know exactly what they will say: “you have alerted on the groin / buttocks area. Do you have a medical device? We will need to pat you down. We can take you a private area if you are uncomfortable doing that here. I will move the back of my hands up and down and side to side. Please stand with your feet shoulder length apart.”
I also know that if you repeat this back to them as they say it, the TSA agent will look at you with pleading eyes, because their bosses watch the cameras to make sure the agent asks the same thing every time.
I believe it is worth a 50% higher ticket cost to avoid a layover. To take an aisle seat on flights under 5 hours and a window seat on flights over 6. To under no circumstances fly without at least one bottle of water. To loosen my shoe laces when I reach my seat and to carefully squeeze my water bottle as I close the cap so that it has room to both expand and contract. To always book international travel with layovers to have the layover in your country of origin, not country of destination.
I have debated with hundreds of gate agents from tens of airlines the precise policy around gate checking musical instruments. I have done the majority of my running as an adult in airports. I have frequently and repeatedly spent $6.50 on bottled water. I have repeatedly jammed 0000000#########00000000##### to get past the phone trees of help lines that do anything but. I have thrown a ziplock bag of hand tools into a trash can at 6:45am in order to avoid checking a bag and make a flight at 7am.
The problem with being good at flying is that flying is awful. Being able to fly is incredible. The actual process of flying sucks. People ask you, how was your flight, and the only honest answer I can say is, I’m here, how bad could it have been? You stack up in long, spindly lines you wouldn’t endure for the greatest restaurant in the world, pour out water you’ll refill in moments, only to find out the same man who just felt up your size 38 blue chino shorts with the back of his hands is also doing you the service of throwing away your toothpaste.
Your gate has changed, your flight is delayed, there’s a long line of angry, stinky people all waiting to yell at the same person who can’t do anything about it. You cram yourself into a tiny seat with an outlet your phone charger falls out of and they hand you ginger biscuits that do not exist anywhere outside of flying. Then you put your phone on airplane mode and, staring across the laps of two strangers out the window, listening to the same 4 albums you have downloaded to your phone, glaring down the same bent wingtip of the same 737, when the new thought hits you that flying is something like death, and that you’re good at both.
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One of the unexpected gifts of travelling internationally was the discovery that I like being American. I like living in a country that doesn’t operate off of social order. It creates a lot of problems, yes, but when you arrive in London to discover no restaurants stay open past, say, 10pm on a week day, and are met with confused looks at the prospect of anyone eating that late, and you spend 14 pounds on crisps in the hotel lobby and are sweeping the sad crumbs off the hotel chair the next morning, you start to develop a sense of something other, something different than the country you grew up in. There’s an expectation of how you act in every country, but my experience of America is that expectation being broader, more generous, more open to interpretation.
What a beautiful gift, the thought: I like it here. I am not blind about why someone else wouldn’t or what I would like to change. But I really do like it here. I think Americans are great at starting things. Maybe it’s this way everywhere right now, but I feel it the most here: a celebration of beginnings. Starting a business, writing a book, pretty much anything but another fucking podcast is met with fanfare, success celebrated even if envied.
But for all our fanfare, all of our starts, we stumble when they come to their inevitable conclusion. We don’t know how to celebrate ends, because we see endings as failure. The business is closed because of mismanagement, a sequence of poor choices ends the relationship, one bad episode gets you fired—we treat the entire operation as a failure. We project the ending moment over the entire thing. We play every hand at the table of life with our chips all. We’re bad at endings, death, and more than anything, travelling.
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The dirty, rotten, inconvenient truth about modern travel, for all its frustrations, is that it’s incredibly efficient. Wildly so. The horror stories of spending hours on the tarmac sit against a backdrop of things by and large running with an incredible level of precision and safety. We complain, we rage, we rant, we shake our fists at the sky airlines attendant, but our rage really is in general misplaced: the real miracle of modern flight wasn’t invented by the Wright brothers, it was honed over decades of customer service.
It’s why for all the talk of yelling at people who work at airlines, I’ve always been more drawn to yell at other passengers. Blue blooded Americans who can’t read basics signs, aren’t listening to announcements over the PA, cannot comprehend that they are in the wrong terminal, cannot turn their carry-on bag sideways in the overhead compartment, cannot intuit that the gate agent also has no clue when the plane will arrive, do not know how to stand near their gate in such a way that other people can walk by, and cannot figure out the difference between seats 21A and 21C.
These things constitute basic situational awareness: the ability to ask the question “if everyone acted the way I did, would this process be better or worse?” A series of simple decisions and action that represent a basic understanding of what everyone is trying to accomplish.
More importantly, it represents how much we misunderstand what it means to be good at something.
We want to think about skill as reaching new heights: the Guinness book of world records for whatever skill we’re currently entertaining. We think about raising the ceiling of something, going above what was considered previously possible.
But that’s being great at something. We’re considered with being simply good. And being good isn’t concerned with the ceiling, it’s concerned with the floor. Can you pass a minimum level of competence in the subject? Well, you might be considered, all things considered, pretty good.
The path to being great at flying involves having a lot of money. The path to being good involves doing a bunch of simple, common-sense things that individually seem obvious but collectively add up to an actual level of competence. The kind of common sense things you can get right nine times in a row then be judged as being bad at flying for missing the 10th.
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The most misunderstood part of being good at something is the reward.
In stories, the knight slays the dragon and returns to the village to marry the village maid who is inexplicably an LA 9. In real life, the knight slays the dragon and is promptly offered any entry level position as a dragon-slaying coordinator with the promise of a bonus depending on dragon-slaying KPIs. And the village maid is at best a village 4.
The reward for work is more work. The reward for being good at something is the opportunity to do it more often.
That’s the problem with being good at travelling. Your reward is not your destination, it’s more travelling. It’s having a bag with toiletries that won’t get thrown away and knowledge of how easy it is to replace most of them at most hotels. It’s knowing to always have a change of clothes in your carry-on bag and precisely the rules by which you check a roller. It’s the calm, practiced smile, the firm tone, and the repeated mantra: I can get what I need without ever making someone else feel bad, a thought like a shield held in front of you at 12:23am when the representative from Air Canada informs you they have fucked up so repeatedly that they are out of hotel vouchers. You’re on your own.
There’s something else: flying never actually gets easier. You get better at it. But until your credit card reaches a bracket known to few, the seats don’t get bigger. The lines don’t get shorter. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about clear and TSA pre but again, these are minor blips in the pond of inconvenience that is travelling.
The paradox of travel is that the only way to actually get better at it is to finally square it up and accept it for what it is: inconvenience. You trade your free will and general pleasantry for what equates to disneyland lines at disneyland prices without any of the disneyland magic.
We like to think we can short cut the whole thing. That we have hacks, methods, rules, tips, and tricks. Everything listed above. But it’s meaningless, because travel is inconvenience, and being good at is about accepting that inconvenience. Accepting that discomfort. To look at the delays and the small seats and the tiny cans of diet coke and to not be surprised, to accept it as par for the course in a life well lived.
We rage against the machine of flying. We look for ways to sneak our deodorant in, to game our way past the long lines of people trying to do the exact same thing as us, convincing ourselves that one day we’ll be good enough at the whole process to avoid ever feeling inconvencied—forgetting that the inconvenience is what we set out for in the first place. So busy trying to shape the world in our own image that we lost sight of what the world was in the first place.
Because by and large flying is efficient. They’ve really figured it out. It’s an inconvenient fact when we’re personally on the butt end of the parts of the process that don’t work. But generalized across the thousands of other hapless souls clogging the gates of the airport, the problem has already been solved.
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They say the final stage of grieving is acceptance. I think that’s true but I also think we get it wrong—we think we’re trying to accept someone is dead but we’re not. I think we actually struggle with death because we can’t accept who people are when they’re alive.
We hold our agendas close to the heart, little hopes, sincere, for the people that we love, held not with malice but with love, and when they do us the inconvenience of doing what every other person who has ever existed did we hate them for it. We hate them not for dying in general, but for dying at this particular point. We hate them for ending the book in the middle of a chapter, for writing that’s all folks and forever marking the point where they stop changing.
We want to give feedback. Add notes. We want to debate the finer points of personality. We are so busy desiring good and right things for the people in our life that we overlook what they are. Or convince ourselves it’s just how they are right now.
When someone dies, our hopes for the person they could become die with them.
No more wiggle room. No more suggestions. A system perfect in its rigidity, Chiron’s boat operating with impeccable timing, ferrying the once-living across to the afterlife without anyone ever accidentally leaving their laptop in their carry-on bag.
Death is the ultimate efficiency.