Why I Didn't Kill The D-bag In Seat 41C - Undividing #11

Plus How To Floor Your Inner Perfectionist, And The Japanese Art Of Wabi-Sabi

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Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world.

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Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash

Hello hello everyone, the new subscribers keep rolling in! Welcome to all new folks who’ve just arrived. Great to have you here.

This week, I’m going to tell you 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.

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.

So welcome again everyone new and old, and let’s get undividing… and please share this out to any friend you think would enjoy undividing with us.

In Undividing #11 this week we’re diving into:

• Undividing Our World - The Douchebag in Seat 41C - How I managed an 11 hour flight with an entitled, self-obsessed douchebag. Or was he?

• Undividing Ourselves - Set a Ceiling and Set a Floor. Your inner perfectionist knows the perfect version. But does it know the minimum you could do, that would actually be totally fine?

• Undividing Extras - Wabi-Sabi - The Japanese art of enjoying the broken, the repaired, the imperfection, and the impermanence of this life. Breathe an uncapitalist sigh of relief.

And read through to the end to see me and Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame blessing my book!

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Undividing Our World: Why I Didn’t Kill The Douchebag In Seat 41C

By all metrics there should have been a video going viral in the feeds these last weeks. 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 Douchebag (DB for short) 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 the movies, 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.

So here’s the full story that started before the hypothetical cameras were pulled out.

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.

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 DB and his girlfriend arrived. Last people to board the plane. Allow me to describe them.

Mixing Patagonia and music festival vibes in the 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.

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 DB 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.

What, the actual, fuck?

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.

I realised 4 things out of this:

1. Don’t take it personally

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

But it wasn’t personal. This was how these two rolled through the world. It had nothing to do with me and Erik. This scene had been repeated a thousand 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.

First, and I have to admit it, 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.

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.

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.

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 about our impression of millennials’ behaviour being not their fault. For me the big lesson in that video is that you have no idea what environment anyone grew up in.

And I had to challenge myself here. 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. And 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. That’s empathy.

4. Finally, I realised 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.

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. All that DB version was doing was making 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. But that said, there are plenty 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.

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?

Not for them, but for you.

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

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Undividing Ourselves: Set A Ceiling, Set A Floor

I have an inner perfectionist that constantly needs keeping in check.

One thing it loves to say is, if I can’t do the perfect amount in totality why bother doing it at all? This comes up a lot with fitness, like, if I can’t do a great two hour perfect workout session at the gym, why bother going?

Two hours is my ceiling and I’m sticking to it. Because it’s my one metric and to do less is failure.

But what if there was a floor?

Let’s say it’s a busy day. But I can do pushups and situps on a yoga mat in my lounge room, and then grab the prayer beads and do some gratitude in a minute and a half.

That’s the floor. And that works too. Both ceiling and floor let me start my day. Both mean I showed up with the best that I had that day. And let’s be honest, most days aren’t perfect.

Floors are useful, because they let you think about and set what the bare minimum is to make it feel like you did it. I was surprised at the change that made in my gym going. Yet the only thing that changed was how I thought about it.

Some new floors I’ve installed.

10 minutes of writing will get an article outline done.

15 minutes of cooking can get a decent pasta out of my kitchen.

5 minutes of stretching makes a day in the writers seat easier.

Is there anywhere in your life you could get your floors done? And be able to say I showed up with the best I had today?

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Undividing Extra: Wabi-Sabi - The Japanese Art of Appreciating Imperfectio n ;)

Taken from the Japanese words “wabi,” which translates to less is more, and “sabi,” which means attentive melancholy, wabi-sabi refers to an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things and a corresponding pleasure in the things that bear the mark of this impermanence.

Basically, the beauty of imperfection and impermanence.

There’s a lot of pressure in this world to be perfect. My social media feeds contain so many teeth whitening, weight loss, posture correction, ultimate workout programs etc that a daily scroll is a reminder of all the ways that society says I’m falling short.

We have a tendency to not fix things, but throw them out and get new ones.

But what’s beautiful about wabi-sabi is to allow… allow the imperfect, allow the broken, allow the asymmetrical, off colour, not quite rightness of the world to shine through.

Two wabi-sabi examples that have made their way to our popular consciousness are kintsugi and sashiko. Kintsugi is repairing broken pottery with gold to highlight and celebrate its randomness and repair. And sashiko is the Japanese art of repair with fabric and sewing. The pic above is from a group of Japanese grandmothers who repair old trainers with sashiko.

Both remind me that nothing is ever truly broken. Everything can be saved. Everything can be repaired. Everything can be loved in whatever form it’s in.

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Till the Emotions Diary on Thursday, big undividing hugs to you all,

Karl

Elizabeth Gilbert Blessed My Book!

As always I would love your support of my book, How To Burn A Rainbow. It’s won a Readers Favorite (Goodreads) and BIBA for LGBTQ+ memoir. And it’s even been given the thumbs up by a hero of mine, Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love.

HTBAR is the story of how my divorce set me on a journey to figure out who I am. A riches to rags rollercoaster of a story that goes from LA to Berlin, where I had to lose it all to find myself.

You can pick a copy up from Jeff at the US Amazon store or from Ru Paul’s Allstora who now ship internationally. Or order one at your local bookstore.