On March 22, 2016 my flight from Paris landed in New York. Before embarking on that trip, I had started to second guess how I had weighed my values to conclude flying was overall good. Today marks the first day of my seventh year without flying. I’ve traveled and seen more of the world and its people more in this time than when I flew.
I grew up flying. My American parents met in India, where we lived a year of my childhood. Many close family members lived flying distance away, a trend that increased as more family members moved farther away. As a history professor who studied mostly India, my father’s livelihood and identity relied on flying. My older sister lived years in Israel and Japan. My younger sister joined the Peace Corps in Africa. They didn’t sail there. My mom and stepfather bought year-long tickets to fly around the world. I lived a year in Paris, then in Shanghai. I don’t think I knew anyone who didn’t fly.
Amid all this flying, I heard no one seriously consider the problems from flying. If anything, people vaguely sensed the exhaust might warm the globe, but the magnitude must have been smaller than what they perceived as the obvious benefits of spreading culture and connectivity. I don’t remember anyone considering people or wildlife displaced to access the oil, noise pollution, military defense of supply chains, and the like as remotely comparable in size of problem to the magnitude of the benefits they took for granted. The benefits, I understood, weren’t just to them, but to the world: “the world benefits from my flying,” everyone believed, it seems. That they personally got to see the Great Barrier Reef or rhinos on safari wasn’t the point. They’d share stories and pictures so everyone would benefit.
So the story went that the benefits were global and huge, the costs abstract and small. No brainer. End of story. Buy the tickets. Let’s go.
It became deeply moral too. As families dispersed, flying meant family. If there was any unalloyed good everyone from every culture agreed on over any wedge issue, it was family. Next would be jobs and producing for society, not being a free rider or parasite. Without flying, people felt, you couldn’t see family or hold down a job. To question flying provoked the response of depriving someone the right to see their parents or hold down a job. Before avoiding flying, I never heard anyone consider questioning it. When I started my year not flying, I saw visceral, moral responses to just questioning it.
Why the indignation?
I wrote recently in Do addicts get less of what they think they get more of? how people addicted to a substance or behavior think they get more of something actually get less. Gamblers feel like winners but are losing money. Heroin addicts think they get more euphoria while living in squalor. Sex addicts think they’re getting intimacy but have less.
People who fly more get the jolt of joy of seeing family because flying led them to live flying distance apart. People who feel flying gives them job opportunities became more dependent.
The longer I don’t fly, the more I see people addicted to flying. I don’t mean addicted as an analogy. I mean it as a behavior addiction like the ones recognized by the main authorities like gambling, video games, and sex can become.
Addicted people become indignant and moral because our voice inside us that tells us to keep doing it tells us it’s good to keep doing it and bad not to.
Historically, people traveled more, I learned from the book The Dawn of Everything, not less the farther back we look, largely owing to living in cities. Flying increased distance traveled, but that’s a lousy measure. Taking a car to an airport, spending hours there, then spending hours or days in a metal tube and other airports, and taking a car or train to a hotel is less of a travel experience than even riding a bike fifty miles. Even just taking a train gives more of a travel experience. Sailing takes it to another level.
We’ve come to confuse flying with traveling, but flying diminishes travel. It leads us to believe nature and interesting things are “out there,” blinding us to the beauty and variety of nature everywhere, even in cities. How many types of trees are within a five-minute walk of where you live? How many varieties of birds? Insects? What constellation are we in right now? Do you know what it means for us to be in a constellation? How much has the variety of trees, birds, and other wildlife decreased in your lifetime? How much is it projected to decrease?
Besides nature, how many of your neighbors within a ten-minute walk do you know? Have you seen a local play or musical performance? How many languages are spoken near you? Has that number increased or decreased? What local foods do they grow? Which, if any, are indigenous? In my experience, people will fly around the world for a food but won’t buy turnips, which in practice are more exotic for appearing more rarely in dishes served to them.
In other words, flying gives the feeling of family, community, connection, jobs, and nature while decreasing our actual experience of them. It spreads family, community, and connections thin to the point of tearing them apart. It destabilizes jobs and the workplace (I didn’t write about that part, but loosely speaking, the gist is that it forces everyone everywhere to compete against everyone for no net gain). It destroys nature while leading us to ignore it all around us, which leads us to pave over more and litter more.
Try it
I recognize that if you haven’t experienced living clean of an addiction, life without it seems empty. I can only imagine what life without meth must seem like to someone addicted to it, especially having to face withdrawal first. But whatever the thrill from the hit of an addiction, life with just what our ancestors lived on for hundreds of thousands of years has everything necessary for all the meaning and purpose without the dependence, craving, poison, invasions to steal resources, hopelessness for a fading future, and helplessness about hurting nearly every living thing for the fleeting pleasure of seeing Stonehenge that doesn’t compare with the guidebook picture. Showing your picture of it on Instagram feeds another addiction.
Learn to love the one you’re with. Enjoy nature everywhere. Buy from your local farmers. When you want to travel, camp, ride a bike, sail, and hike. I know such advice sounds like suggesting to a heroin user to exercise, eat healthy, and sleep regularly instead of injecting. For most of you it will go in one ear and out the other, but I’m starting my seventh year clean and I can tell you from experience, clean life beats addicted, withdrawal isn’t that bad, and I got more of what I thought flying brought without it than with it.
With me, it began by challenging myself to a year without flying. That’s it. By three months, I already experienced that I didn’t face deprivation or sacrifice, which I had expected. I found more adventure, family, fun, freedom, community, connection, meaning, and purpose.
I started thinking avoiding flying was about global warming. Yes, but in a tiny sense compared to how much it improved my life directly beyond anything I could have imagined until I experienced it, and there’s nothing special about my connection to family, nature, etc.
Enjoy!
That your “addiction” was cured in only three months says everything about the immense privilege that seems to be lurking behind this wall of intellectual masturbation. Flying, like all forms of transportation, is a means to an end. Very few people get on a plane just for the sake of getting on a plane. Many people go years without flying just out of circumstance and then do it again when such a purpose for it arises. It’s genuinely absurd to liken that to meth or cigarettes, and it says a lot about how out of touch you seem to be when you needed to “challenge” yourself to reduce your flying for such an insignificant period of time.
The average person who _does_ fly isn’t flying every month, or even more than once a year, if at all. They’re – at best – flying once every year or two for a vacation. If they’re seeing family, it’s probably once around Christmas. Most people who do this just simply don’t have the funds or the time off from work to fly as frequently as you’ve seemingly admitted to doing. If you flew as frequently as you imply, then the damage done by _your_ addiction and _your_ carbon footprint in the pursuits of _your_ advantages and _your_ leisures before you quit flying were leaps and bounds beyond those of the vast, vast majority of people you seem to be deriding as “addicts,” and quite possibly more damage than most of these people will do in their lives. If you want to make an example of yourself, that’s fine, but the volume of pieces you’ve written about this topic suggests considerable self-righteousness instead, and given your apparent history and your warped view of how/why people travel, it shouldn’t surprise you that it might come off to people the same way a billionaire would when they tell you that you’re “addicted” to money for negotiating a 3% raise.
You could make the same argument about dispersion of “communities” by pointing to every way we’ve increased the speed or pace of transportation throughout history. The first humans reached North America with their own legs. The Roman world spread across thousands of miles using horses and ships. You’ve glorified sailing, something which enabled the European colonization of the world and the destruction of the many cultures they encountered. I genuinely don’t understand how – by your logic – any form of travel wouldn’t a community-thinning addiction, nor how short-term travel (something enabled over greater distances by the airplane) would be more detrimental to communities than permanent migration, which travel in these old days required a commitment to.
I permanently abandoned several “communities” because I was genuinely uninterested in the minutiae that you seem to find fulfillment in. I did it without flying. I also haven’t been back. Yet I suspect this is less objectionable to you than a low-income family’s one-off round-trip flight to their dream destination simply because of how this piece comes off.
The bottom line: good for you for breaking a supposed addiction that most of the people reading this will never have, but you don’t have me convinced that you’re genuinely feeling better about yourself when you’re writing about this same topic over, and over, and over, and over again. If you’re surprised at how some people might perceive it, maybe try being less smug about it.
I appreciate the response. I posted about it in a full post: An anonymous reader: Your “immense privilege that seems to be lurking behind this wall of intellectual masturbation”.