How I Avoided Plane Rage (And TikTok Fame) - Undividing #28

Pulling empathy out of the flaming wreckage.

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Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world.

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Greetings all, as you know I’m on holidays and reposting from Italy. But this is a post I wrote back in January; as under read as it is relevant.

It’s a story about a couple on a plane who sat in front of me and my partner Erik on a flight home from Australia and how their complete and total disregard for us made my blood boil. But then, how that episode turned into a surprising lesson in perception and empathy. And now rereading it today, curiosity.

Which also explains why there’s no video doing the rounds right now of me ripping the guy out of his seat. And his seat as well.

Even if you’re a long term subscriber (thank you!) and have read this before when it had a different title, I’ve rewritten it and added more thoughts to my original. So it’s worth another go round.

Since I started writing Undividing, my thinking has changed a lot and I don’t look at this scenario in the same way. The new additions and changes are in italics.

Let’s get undividing…

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By all metrics there should have been a video going viral in the feeds last January…

In it, there would have been me and this other guy getting into it on a flight. How far will they go, you would have wondered, because if it’s viral that means it must get pretty ugly.

I’ll set the scene; it’s the very last two rows of the plane. Me and my partner Erik are being crushed by this guy in front of me, and his girlfriend in front of Erik. Seats right back like it’s the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars.

By the time the passenger across the aisle from us started filming, we’d already be well into the fight about space sharing. I’d be yelling something about where this guy’s humanity is, and who the hell raised him.

He’d be yelling at me about his rights and that he wasn’t breaking any laws. His girlfriend would be joining in as well, with a couple of surprising and impressive insults that no one was expecting as she’d been so quiet. Meanwhile Erik would be trying to break the fight up.

I’d probably yell something about their generation (but not using generational terms, as I wrote about in Undividing #8 - The Generation Trap, because we don’t do that) and definitely something about their entitlement.

Then the whole plane would start chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and the last thing you’d see in the footage is me and this guy having a punch up that’s a lot less cool than something in a John Wick film, as the crowd on the plane roared in approval.

Follow up edit, we’re both led off the plane by the authorities when it lands in Berlin.

So where’s the video then?

It doesn’t exist. Because obviously none of that ever happened. But it also doesn’t play in my Kopfkino as the Germans say, or my “head cinema.”

Nor does it live in the heads of anyone else in my circle because I only told the story twice, and then decided to never tell it again.

Until now, because there’s something really valuable to learn out of this.

Erik and I had chosen these seats at the back of the plane which had worked so well on the flight to Australia. The way this plane was laid out, it was all rows of threes until the final row which had just two. I’m 6’3” and have a “no exit row, no fly” rule, but I have to say, these last two seats were pretty amazing, full recline and everything.

Plus we had no one next to us, Erik had a window, and lots of extra space to the side. The flight to Oz was a breeze.

Photo by Pedro Cambron on Unsplash

Sadly, we didn’t repeat the same deal on the way home. A larger plane, two rows of two seats at the back. We were in the final row again, this time with seats that were an inch from the wall.

As the plane boarded we thought, actually we might be ok. No one came to sit in the seats in front of us. Till this couple arrived. Last people to board the plane.

Mixing Patagonia and music festival vibes in their outfits, they were in their mid-30s and from somewhere in Europe I couldn’t put my finger on by the accents. Their backpacks caught my eye. I couldn’t tell you the brand, but every panel is a different colour. It’s the signature of a fair-trade outdoor company that’s a full transparency on the supply chain kind of brand. (postscript: Cotopaxi is the brand)

They looked like they’d just come back from a yoga retreat in Bali, using their energy raise the consciousness of the world and bring about global peace.

I thought, oh good, they’ll be nice folks. They sat down, settled in, then we took off.

The moment the seatbelt sign was off, they turned around to face us, craning their necks adorned with ethically sourced jewellery over the headrests.

“Do you mind if we put our seats back?” she asked us. That’s kind, I thought.

“Actually,” I replied, “we’d prefer it if you didn’t. We’re both really tall, I’ve had a knee injury, and we can’t put our seats back in this row.”

“Oh….” she said. She and her boyfriend exchanged a look.

Then they put their seats right back as far as they’d go, to the point where I had to stick my knee in the aisle so the metal wouldn’t be banging on it. Erik and I looked at each other incredulous.

Why did they even ask in the first place? I decided that there must have been a lost in translation.

I tapped the guy on the shoulder.

“Hey mate,” I said, “sorry, but we meant can you NOT put your seats back, we have no room back here at all. My knee is injured. I don’t fit in this space when your seat is back.”

And then he delivered the line that stunned me.

“Well, we’ve just got off an 11 hour flight where someone just did the same thing to me, so…” and with a “too bad” shrug he turned back around. Conversation over. Then he and his girlfriend started kissing.

Those seats stayed back for the next 11 hours. Even during meal times.

Photo by Bambi Corro on Unsplash

Let’s break it down instead of breaking skulls

We’ve all been in a situation like this, where someone’s complete lack of empathy is almost shocking. And we are left wondering what to do with it, while battling the rising rage.

The part that made my blood boil wasn’t the act itself. It was the way that our first answer was obviously not even relevant to them; they were going to put the seats back whatever we said.

And the biggest one was when I asked him to show some humanity, he was so casual in his justification of why he wasn’t going to give an inch. Literally.

After stewing quietly in my seat for a few minutes I decided to use this as an exercise. It was that or end up on TikTok and in jail.

I realised 4 things out of this:

1. Don’t take it personally

First thought was, of course, to take it personally. I’d have been reasonable. I would have at least split the difference.

However, the systems we live in make us feel invisible. I thought a request for decency would be recognised, so when it wasn’t it hit my moral identity. I would have done this for you, why would you not do this for me? It’s personal on that level.

But it wasn’t personal at the same time. This was how this couple rolled through the world. It had nothing to do with me and Erik. This scene had probably been repeated many times in different forms large and small to different folks. Erik and I were just the latest.

That helped to take the sting out. Then I really focused on what was happening.

2. They felt justified

Why?

I think there’s a few reasons.

a. First, they technically didn’t do anything wrong. Those were their seats. That is the space they paid for. They’re allowed to put their seats back.

Another way to look at that scenario had it blown up, is that I could be the one in the wrong, trying to take something that wasn’t mine. Like one of those crazy people you see in plane-rage videos, bashing the seat in front of them forward, yelling at the top of the lungs. The people we look at and think, ok, they’re crazy.

But that doesn’t explain the lack of empathy.

b. I just finished reading an article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson called “The Anti-Social Century” that shed some light on it. In it, Thompson calls out how we have mistaken the loneliness epidemic for something more deadly: self-imposed isolation.

Max Guther for The Atlantic

He begins to describe his local restaurant. How the bar that used to be the hub of the place, where people sat on barstools, ate and drank, and laughed it up, which had a halo effect of joy over what was always a packed out establishment.

Now he was eating there with his wife and two kids in an otherwise empty restaurant. Here’s the crazy thing though; business was booming. In the time they were there, a dozen large takeaway food orders were picked up by couriers or customers. No words were said, just a QR code flashed.

“The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.”

Thompson goes on to explain that in the restaurant business 74% of it now comes from off-premises. Meaning that people are eating alone more often. Because what he discovered is that “people feel uncomfortable out in the world.” So they go out there less and less.

He concludes his lengthy and fascinating piece with, “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.” It is the breakdown of our society, because we are by nature social creatures.

Back to the couple in 41C and 41B. If you don’t ever have contact with other people that’s not 100% on your or your group’s terms, you never learn to negotiate. Bigger than that, you probably don’t even understand why you have to.

c. Now when I read what I wrote I have another thought on this as it’s something I’ve seen a lot in my own city and I think stems from so much of our lives being projected on social - Performative ethics vs lived values. He and his girlfriend were dressed like they were trying to save the world. But sharing it was not in the manifesto. Part of living an ethos is doing it when it’s inconvenient. Doing good, as opposed to looking like you do good. This may have been what threw me at the beginning, setting up an expectation that didn’t get met.

d. And a final new point; digital norms are bleeding into physical space. Online, there’s no expectation of spatial empathy. We scroll past suffering, mute whoever annoys us, and curate a bubble where discomfort can be blocked. That behavior is now migrating offline. More and more in the real world, people act like avatars, not neighbors. A friend of mine put it beautifully, “It always just feels too ‘people-y’ out there.”

To ask for him to engage his empathy for a stranger was asking him to do something he may have had little, or even zero, practice in as an adult. Or seen little benefit in doing at the time.

Whatever the reason, zero empathy could probably be expected from him so…

3. I had to engage my empathy instead.

It brought back to mind that fantastic video of Simon Sinek’s that (our impression of) how millennials’ behave is not their fault. For me the big lesson in that video is that you have no idea what environment anyone grew up in. And you can’t judge that by yours.

And I had to challenge myself here. And not just perform my own ethics. I love this quote below. But if I couldn’t take it off my screensaver and use it in the world, then I’m holding it as an empty platitude.

Here goes, I thought. I said to myself in my cramped space, I will have empathy for this person who can’t show me any in return.

But then I had to tweak it; I was looking down on him. Which is moral superiority.

So I switched in my mind to “OK, I get you. And if I’d grown up the way you both have, I would probably do the same thing” instead.

But even that now doesn’t strike me as real empathy, there’s a whiff of moral superiority to it still. So instead I had to look at it this way, this time round.

What he was doing was what he thought was fair. I was asking for what I thought was fair. Both of us have different ideas about what fair is. I think this is closer to true empathy.

But today I would have engaged curiosity and not empathy. Got into a conversation with him not to ask him to move his seat, but to understand why he wouldn’t.

4. He felt owed.

The clue was that he’d said the same thing had happened to him on the flight before. That someone had had their seat all the way back in front of him. My reaction would have been, well I wouldn’t want to do that to someone else when I know how bad it felt.

His take was that he’d just suffered through this, and that was a justification that it was OK to do it to someone else. No wrong had been committed in his mind at all. If anything, it was a vindication.

I’ll go further: his “someone did this to me first” comment might be an internalized belief that the world is inherently unfair, so all he can do is take what little he’s owed. Maybe it was survival mode in disguise.

5. He may have felt what he was doing was being evolved.

Post-2020, many people adopted a "me-first" mindset under the banner of self-care. Boundaries became sacred. Comfort was king. And empathy got relegated to optional when you’re, "protecting your energy." He might not see himself as inconsiderate, but as assertive and evolved.

What was the conclusion then?

Was I really in a tortured position? I still slept, I still had enough room if I wiggled around, my knee incurred no further damage.

OK so if no physical harm had come to pass, it was down to mental.

Here’s where I landed, as we landed.

The guy had done the best he could in the situation that he found himself in. Given the environment he grew up in, the prevailing social isolation trend of our times, and that he’d been through the same thing.

So I didn’t need to forgive him. Armed with all of that, I let it go.

But I learned three really valuable lessons out of it

1. I felt no injustice. Making it not personal meant I didn’t hang on to it. This isn’t on heavy rotation in my Kopfkino. I told the story only twice to people I knew, kind of on autopilot, and then decided not to tell it again. I didn’t like getting the “what a douchebag” milage out of it. Because that wasn’t how I felt about it.

2. The buck stopped with me. The version I could have told about the inhumanity of this couple made me a victim, him a villain, and the listener the saviour who makes all the right noises when I recount the tale. Instead, I decided to tell this version instead. One that doesn’t confirm to others how many bad people are out there in the world.

3. I went back and unpacked all my other victim stories. “Seat 41C” the blockbuster movie didn’t get played in the cinema after its run of 11 hours flight time. But that said, there are plenty of other head cinemas that I have on heavy rotation. You know, the ones where you practice your lines in the shower. Instead, I went back to these incidents one by one and applied the same question, “What is it like to be them?” And I’m happy to say I’ve let some big stories go.

Hated The Ending - One Star

Look, I get it. No punch ups, no snappy lines, no broken teeth. It’s not very Hollywood.

But this is the thing about being someone who is undividing their way through the world. The work isn’t sexy. It doesn’t get likes. It’s not about connecting with other people later through stories of suffering.

It’s about the quiet work in yourself that moves the world forward.

All I can say is that I like this ending a lot. And maybe it’s not one you were hoping to hear, but one you’d love to feel.

Now reading this I have more questions about it. And realise that if I could turn back time, I’d still not return with snappy lines, or make my own TikTok for likes and a global outpouring of sympathy. I really would love to have asked him why—led with curiosity and not empathy.

And this article would have been an account of that why, and what was under that. Not a lot of analysis and guesswork. Because I bet there was more to it than I can guess. As there always is with everything we find ourselves doing everyday.

The more I write Undividing, the more I land back in the same place: we need to be in conversation with each other.

Still, I’m very happy that the negativity I received I left on the ground afterwards. I didn’t carry it with me. And best of all, I didn’t use it as justification to do someone else a disservice.

And I do like that the whole episode helped me dismantle some old stories I’d been carrying around.

Is there a story you’ve been holding onto? Where you were hard done by, or a victim? Could you pause to ask yourself what that other person was going through, or what it’s like to be them? And let it go?

Or is there a chance still to engage with them again with curiosity over certainty about why they did what they did?

Not for them, but for you. So you don’t have to write a story to fill in the gaps.

Your chance to let that story go, is now boarding.

Let me know in the comments your thoughts on the original, the additions, and anything else that came up reading or listening this week. Love to know your thoughts.

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And that brings us to the end of Undividing #28.

Till Thursday when we do the next Emotions Diary, let’s move through this world undividing, and see what this planet can do.

Karl

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