At Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington we use Microsoft Teams, and if I forget to close the app on my personal phone, calls to my work number come to wherever I am. That’s how I ended up having a delightful chat with an 88-year-old gentleman who had tried to call me at work to chat about a recent Listener column on music. He ended the call saying he’d seen me in an airport some years ago but didn’t want to bother me. I then joked I’d write a column about airport behaviour, so here it is.
If you google “psychology of airports” you might get the same AI summary that I did: “Airports, as liminal spaces, evoke unique psychological responses due to their transitional and overwhelming environment.”
“Liminal spaces”? In short, “liminal” means “in between” and, unless you work in an airport, or you’re Tom Hanks in that movie about the stateless dude who had to live in an airport, they are indeed places of transition. The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, apparently said, “I have homes in London and LA, but I spend most of my life in transit lounges.”
For travellers, airports are transitional spaces. You don’t call them home, you often find yourself in them at odd hours. Even in the middle of the night they’re often overly lit with that hummy kind of light that stabs your eyeballs.
I once spent a night sleeping under a check-in counter at Los Angeles International Airport with only a slightly quizzical cleaner for company after missing my connecting flight.
My philosophy professor, Kim Sterelny, once described LAX as “one of the great shitholes of the universe” in a conference talk about cultural evolution. His point was that we think of evolution as a slow process whereby you end up with more birds with long beaks if that’s what is needed to catch food. But if that was the case, nobody would ever emerge from LAX alive or sane; our evolutionary past just didn’t prepare us for it.
When you’re in a liminal space, you’re Schrödinger’s cat – you both exist and don’t exist. Time goes funny as you wait to board that 11pm flight in the knowledge you’re going to get dinner in a couple of hours. You’ll disembark in a different time zone that you’ll intellectually understand, but in a body that is going to tell you midnight is really midday as you stare at the ceiling hysterically tired. That was my last four-day UK conference experience, in which I spent more time on planes and in airports than on the ground in Winchester.
Emotions run high in airports; they’re filled with anticipation of the holiday at the other end, or resentment at the inevitable return to work when it’s all over.
There’s the sadness of saying goodbye. There’s the nagging worry that comes from foolishly watching Cast Away a couple of months before your honeymoon (Tom Hanks must love aeroplanes and airports).
When the clock counts down past scheduled departure and you’ve a tight connection to make, that emotion can erupt in ways you would never allow in a normal day or place.
And the queues. As a student of human behaviour, I find it fascinating that we will start queuing even when we know it’s not going to make a difference. But that’s why we queue – to feel like we are in control. I try to resist but I get caught up in that, too, jonesing for that feeling that comes with settling into your seat and knowing your holiday is really going to happen.
