My college philosophy buddy Jean Paul (Sartre) once wrote, "Hell is other people." That always sounded like more of his usual babble, but now I'm starting to get it.
Over my holiday travels, I learned far more than I wanted to about the lives of others, including a lot of the very personal and mundane details—"Did Susie go pick up the dry-cleaning yet?"—through overheard phone conversations in rental car shuttles, inside airports, and on airplanes before take-off.
I learned:
A lady in the Southwest terminal at San Francisco International Airport has "mixed feelings" about her niece's plans to go to college a year early next year, and that her daughter should have told her about the mechanic's estimate for her car, which has brake issues.
A guy waiting at gate C45 in Denver wants his kid (or somebody) to grab all the bikes and other crap strewn on the lawn, and lock it all in the garage before leaving for skiing.
Another dude in a flat-bill cap, while sitting on the tarmac in Phoenix, informed some unknown bro that he felt the "go-to-market" plan for the new something-or-other is "totally solid," and that now "it just comes down to execution."
It made me wonder if this constant (and growing) barrage of other peoples' mundanities—this "social pollution"— is just an annoyance, or if it could be bad for our psyches, our senses of self. If nothing else, it's certainly shifting cultural mores around our expectations of public versus private.
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