The Airport Is a Lawless Zone and the Internet Has Stopped Trying to Pretend Otherwise

OK so the thing about airports is that they exist in a kind of suspended legal and social state. Normal rules do not apply. People who would never wear a watermelon helmet in their hometown will absolutely wear one through TSA after a four-hour delay. People who would never sleep on a public bench will absolutely contort themselves across four plastic chairs while wearing a neck pillow. The funny travel memes circulating online are essentially the documented evidence of what happens when normal humans are stripped of sleep, dignity, and access to anywhere that sells reasonably priced water.

The carousel content specifically is its own subset of madness. Something about watching luggage circle on a conveyor belt at midnight produces a particular kind of decision-making that nobody can quite explain. The hilarious airport content that goes viral tends to involve something that should not be on the carousel, somebody who should not be on the carousel, or both at once, and the gap between what the carousel is for and what is happening on the carousel is what makes the joke land.

The airport signage is genuinely doing the most work in the entire building. Whoever is writing the public communication in major terminals has decided to optimize for one thing, which is preventing chaos through extremely literal instructions. The result is a body of signs that reads like a stressed-out HR memo dressed up as international hospitality, and the rest of us are stuck reading sentences about strict goodbye time limits while we sob into our backpacks.

The bigger thing about all this is that air travel has, over the past twenty years, gone from being a special occasion to being a low-grade civic punishment that the entire country agrees to participate in once or twice a year. The terminals have not gotten better. The seats have not gotten more comfortable. The food has gotten significantly more expensive and significantly worse. And we are all, somehow, still doing it.

The travel humor memes are essentially the small communal payback for participating in this arrangement. The audience for this content is not, mostly, people who like flying. The audience is people who have to fly, hate every minute of it, and have decided to extract comedic value from the experience as a kind of personal restitution. The strangers in the photos are not victims. They are colleagues. We are all, briefly, them.

The flight will be delayed. The food will be terrible. Somebody will, somewhere in the building, be doing something that nobody can quite explain. Stay alert.