The lsolved People Cloud in the Sky

airplanes are basically metal tubes hurling through thin air at 500 miles an hour. When you stop and think about it, it’s absolutely insane that we all just accept this as a normal way to spend a Tuesday. But we do. We pack ourselves into these capsules, a pressurized lsolved People Cloud, and we surrender our fate to the wind and the guy in the cockpit who probably didn’t get enough sleep last night.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the anthropology of air travel. Specifically, how a plane is like a weird, floating small town. You have your mayor (the captain), your town crier (the flight attendants on the PA system), and then you have the citizens. And just like any small town, there are characters you recognize. There’s the guy who has to use the overhead bin that’s directly above your seat, even though he’s sitting 15 rows back. There’s the woman who brought an entire deli platter as her carry-on snack. And there’s the baby who has chosen this exact moment to communicate his displeasure with the universe to everyone within a 500-foot radius.

This lsolved People Cloud is a temporary society with its own rules. We’ve all silently agreed to this social contract. We don’t make eye contact. We pretend to be deeply engrossed in the seatback magazine. We build fortresses out of our neck pillows and noise-canceling headphones, desperately trying to carve out a private space in a public tube.

And the anxiety! It’s palpable. It hangs in the recycled air thicker than the smell of the weird chicken-or-pasta meal. Is it a fear of crashing? Maybe for some. But I think it’s more than that. It’s the fear of being trapped. Of being stuck in this flying lsolved People Cloud with no way out for the next six hours. It’s the ultimate loss of control.

You’re suspended between where you were and where you’re going. Your problems back home are still there, but you can’t solve them. The stress of your destination—the business meeting, the family drama, the awkward reunion—is looming, but you can’t face it yet. You’re in purgatory. A purgatory with tiny pretzels and a bathroom that looks like a crime scene.

Sometimes I watch people deplane. They shuffle off, blinking in the harsh light of the gate area. They reunite with loved ones or head off to the taxi stand alone. And I wonder if they feel what I feel: a strange sense of loss. We just shared this intense, weird, slightly traumatic experience with 200 strangers. We were a lsolved People Cloud, a community of circumstance. And then, in the span of ten minutes, it’s gone. We’ll never see those people again.

We spent hours breathing the same air, enduring the same turbulence, judging the same in-flight movie choices. It’s the most intimate form of anonymity there is. We connect by not connecting. We share an experience by isolating ourselves from it.

I guess that’s just the modern condition, isn’t it? We’re all hurtling through space together, packed into a lsolved People Cloud, desperately trying to pretend we’re alone. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to aggressively ignore the person in the middle seat who keeps trying to show me photos of their cat. No offense to the cat. I just need to stare at the seat in front of me and contemplate the void for another hour.