Live a little, don’t choose your flight mate

I feel a little bad for people like me, who have small children. In addition to the agony of flying with them, parents will now have to face the ignominy of being pointedly rejected by the Social Seat Selector. On a flight, absolutely nobody wants to sit next to mothers with babies, not even other moms with babies.

Clearly, this Seat Selector is an option geared towards younger travellers, the Facebook generation that has grown up online and wants to take the concept of hanging with a group of like-minded pals everywhere. If you’re looking to meet someone interesting onboard, it seems that the first requirement is that they be people who share, if not your outlook on life at least a fondness for the same TV shows or books. Or something.

But the presumption that somebody with wildly different ideas and background not matching your own will not be interesting, is flawed to begin with. What about the value of unpredictability? The odds aren’t very good but there’s a slim, random and wholly delicious possibility of running into someone really special, who just happens to be sitting next to you.

To choose people who match your worldview in an online life is one thing, but there’s something divisive and weird about taking that onto real life connections and meetings that have always happened randomly. It seems like a very narrow-minded and intolerant way to live.

If it wasn’t for the unexpected, life would be very tedious. John Lennon expressed the sentiment eloquently with “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” Anticipation of the unforeseen keeps us enthusiastic and driven. It’s what makes the more adventurous (or reckless) among us push the envelope, try sky diving or bungee jumping, or even a career switch.

Most of the big events that occur in all our lives, how you meet a spouse or lover or what profession you choose, is entirely a matter of chance. It’s what optimists call destiny. So if we make a conscious effort to remove chance from every aspect of our lives, even in brief, unimportant air commutes, we close ourselves entirely to new experiences.

Where would romance be if every encounter was sussed and vetoed online before the very first meeting?  Jane Austen wouldn’t have noted that “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” Love stories, especially the exhilarating ones, thrive on bizarre and random occurrences. In David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, the protagonists Zhivago and Lara first meet at a Christmas Eve party where she’s gone specifically to kill her lover. Instead of pre-arranging everything, we need to embrace surprise. Live a little. Don’t choose your flight mate.

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