TECHNOLOGY | DIGITAL LIFE
The Strange Mundanity of Flight
Airplanes, Wi-Fi and the new normals we invariably accept
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…
