Airports these days are a perfect picture of American affluenza. The US upper-ish class has too much money, but never enough. Lots of suspicious “pre-boarders,” teens in designer clothes, $500 headphones muttering ‘what?’ to flight staff. There are like 50 people in “boarding group 1” now, as well. You can see the confusion on people’s faces who’ve clearly been boarding first for a while, who now wait 20 minutes standing just to have their spot in line! The lounges are overrun, and again, you can see the exasperation on the faces of people waiting for them, thinking they’d paid for a service and realizing that now it’s like Disneyworld. Prices across the board have gone up, and demand keeps up. This is one of the effects of mass affluence, I guess. Airline taxes are as high as ever, and as a result actual “budget” flights (à la Ryanair) are not allowed. At this point, a budget flight is anything under… $300? People are amazingly unforgiving. They get violent looks in their eyes when staff announce that overhead bin space will run out. For many flyers, being asked to check a bag is like being asked for one of their kidneys. So many people look at children like they’re rodents that have infiltrated the house, rather than our treasures and our future. Parents are the scapegoat of every flight. Funny enough, the TSA feels like the one thing that has gotten better. Maybe I choose my airports and flying times well, but I don’t remember the last time I waited more than 15 minutes to get through. Sometimes the CLEAR line is comically longer than the regular line next to it. And for whatever reason, people will just _not_ move over to the shorter line. It’s pretty rare to see actual brawling, but you do hear about these things. As a writer and chronicler of America, this entropy interests me. I’m almost immunized from feeling the pressure, because I’ve taught myself to laugh about it and observe. I see the story, and as a result the chaos isn’t so bad. And to me, mass affluence is the biggest story in the country. People who thought they’d “made it” are stuck in a Commons that they feel has degraded. They’re in a race to constant fly all around the country, and even the ones with quite a bit of money are feeling the squeeze. At the Santa Barbara airport recently, about to board an upsetting expensive, 38 minute flight to San Francisco, I saw this in its purest form. Everyone flying from SB to SF is “rich.” Nearly all live in multimillion-dollar houses. And there they were, watching private jets take off through the windows, about to board a full commercial flight themselves. Affluenza. Me? I try to always feel the wonder. Isn’t it amazing how quickly we can get basically anywhere? It seems so soul destroying to develop an entitlement here. The US is what it is. And it’s a machine to make services widely available at a market price. The chaos begins when a lot more people get pretty wealthy; you see this same pattern in ski resorts, housing markets, etc. Already we see lots of cultural messaging encouraging people to “exit” from all this — either by amassing enough money, or by voluntarily choosing slower things (trains, small towns, camping). I think we’ll see more of that. What do you think of my theory?