There are a lot of odd things about the times in which we’re living, but few are odder than the fact that we can launch into the atmosphere in window-equipped sky-mobiles and disembark on another side of the world. Arguably stranger still, though, is how quickly we’ve become jaded to the novelty.
A mere century after the Wright Brothers bravely attempted a feat once reserved for the birds, we’re shutting windows and watching tablets sooner than watching the world we know shrink surreally beneath us. For a species of bipedal land dwellers, it’s a little shocking how quickly we’ve grown desensitized to the impossible grandeur of the world we know vanishing beneath a weightless tapestry of water vapor.
There’s hardly anything more emblematic of our fast-paced lives than the mundanity of the commercial airplane flight. The Wi-Fi-equipped, bathroom-clad cabin hurtling through the clouds is a potent metaphor for the modern age.
Part of life these days is learning to look out over impossible peaks with a bleary-eyed detachment. Our lives are precipitous. In the iPad-holding lawyer seated at the window beside me, I see our species in spades. In his expressionless stare toward his streaming service log-in, I see the humanity that can take absolutely anything for granted. In this floating room traveling at inconceivable speeds between different coasts and climates, I see a numbness of comical proportions.
“Excuse me. Excuse m — ” asks a man in a suit with a laptop propped neatly onto his seat’s personal, in-built desk.
“Hi! How can I help?” replies the flight attendant, a rolling cart full of colas and crackers attached umbilically at the waist.
“The Wi-Fi won’t work,” he presses brusquely. He looks toward the beleaguered attendant with a rapt void of patience, his spacecraft continuing its luxurious peregrination over the planet’s largest ocean. Soaring between storm clouds and thunderous flashes of lightning, his eyes remain fixed firmly on the feigned-smiling attendant.
“Have you tried signing in on the American Airlines website?” she asks with a grated perfunctory grin.
“No,” he replies. But after a few more pronounced blinks, he discovers the plain and sober honesty of her advice. 30 seconds and a blithe “thank you” later, the man is perusing mindlessly between a vast world of streaming options with blankened, blasé stares. He closes the window and fixes his zombified pupils on his selection. Instead of watching his planet from the humbling vantage point of a space-bound astronaut, he’s watching what — judging from the little of his screen I can make out — I’m 90% sure is “Tiger King.” And going off of his captively glazed corneas, it’s not even his first time watching it.
Pedestrian disinterest colors windows to a world of oceans, mountains, planes, and chasms. Verdant forests, aquamarine bays, and staggering vistas congeal into a democratized one in our gaping, borderless world. Powering through cumulonimbus clouds with a propulsive force, we’re granted a rare opportunity to see the world in an honest light. For the astronauts who’ve seen Earth from above, they report being viscerally changed by the sight. To look back at our planet and see its place within the grand fixture of everything is a powerfully humbling experience.
It’s easily forgotten that even the commercial flight offers a comparable opportunity for reflection. If we’d never figured out flight, the conception of our interconnected world would be gleaned only through photographs. Now, a flight between coasts costs little more than a fancy meal. More exorbitant flights come equipped with chefs of their own.
But even seated in coach, people have an opportunity to revel in grand impossibilities. The blurring of all lines and territories is no small thing to behold. The systematic shrinking of homes, skyscrapers, and societies should be enough to instill anyone with a certain humility. That we would ever achieve a thing like flight was never a given.
But then, the internet was scarcely even an idea before we began sending information across the globe at light speed. Even the grandest of opportunities have a way of crumbling into banality after a few days. The most staggering of paradigm shifts are difficult to make proper sense of when the only world we know is in unceasing flux.
That’s why we never properly reckon with each new change that we incur — why we struggle to process this world running rampant with deep fakes for what it is. We’re a species in a perpetual state of vertigo and we know no different. We walk through a braver, newer world with each passing moment. We never even fully gained our bearings back in the old one.
We’re the same species we were yesterday as we grapple with AI and cyber-attacks and all the bizarre new components of our ever-accelerating world. We’re mere millennia removed from fires in caves; maybe it goes without saying that we lack the capacity to understand Wi-Fi, computers, and commercial flights for the astonishing leaps forward they each represent.
There’s nothing that presses home this struggle for me as flagrantly as the quotidian nature of flight. That these futuristic sky voyages have worked their way into our hardened normal is a telling proof of who we are.
From pandemics to FaceTime calls and artificial intelligence encroachments, we adjust with a stark raving immediacy to each new update and peril life poses. Only a few months into this latest storm and people triple my age are prompting AIs to do their bidding with cavalier commands. It’s a sink-or-swim world, and its sea level had begun rapidly rising before we’d even begun to worry about a thing like “global warming.”
No matter how many times we try to plant our feet firmly on the ground, we remain helpless passengers of this dizzying, dizzying ride. If we try to anchor ourselves we’re tossed from our cosmic merry-go-round completely. This ever-spinning world yields little room for reflection. and trying to hit pause grows more and more fruitless with each passing year.
But on an airplane, the only pause is a swift fall from the sky. There’s no disembarking the ride. The only real choice is to sit while soaring. The future is here to stay, and in the blanched-with-boredom faces of sky travelers, I see that there’s nothing we can’t grow used to. We stream movies to personal TVs as we traverse the skies of our planet. There’s no such thing as a new normal that we can’t accept.
Whether we’re putting Neuralink chips inside our heads or welcoming alien inhabitants onto Earth, it will be an adjustment period of only days. If the novelty of Netflix on airplanes can become humdrum in a matter of just a year or two, it’s hard to conceive of any reality we could never truly accept.
If we can unsarcastically lament the speeds of our sky-high Wi-Fi in our cloud shuttles, then assimilation is our middle name. Accepting the unacceptable is as human as hitting the snooze button on our pocket-sized oracles. Traversing stranger and stranger waters is part of who we are. There’s no “what if?” we’re unwilling to entertain.
But even while we struggle to look objectively at the world around us — to sit in awe before the magnitude of our stunning leaps forward — we’d sooner fall from the sky before forfeiting the amenities of the modern world. We live in the future. We’re just too numb to realize it.
What a brilliant article, Ben. Bravo. You made me think about things I rarely think about.