We got to talking about air travel again today at lunch, specifically the fear of air travel. It seems like I am coming across an increasing number of people who are afraid to fly and need Xanax or copious booze in order to get through it without having a breakdown. A lot of these people are like me in that they have only developed this fear in their adulthood. I wonder why that is.
Is it as simple as attributing it to 9/11 and TV shows and movies like "Lost" and "Cast Away" that graphically depict air disasters? I guess it could be, but if that were the main factor, it seems to me that our fears would gradually decrease over time, but I feel like the opposite is true. I am more afraid of flying now than I was flying to New York two weeks after 9/11 and I saw "Lost" and "Cast Away" years ago.
There have, of course, been real life crashes to inspire fear, but they are few and far between and we've all heard the statistics that say it is dramatically safer to travel by plane than it is by car.
Is it a natural increasing sense of our own mortality as we get older? I am sure that is some part of it, but that doesn't explain the specificity of this fear.
So what is it then?
1 comment:
And now it looks like the plane broke up in mid-air. How does it just break in mid-air?
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