Why I don’t listen to flight safety instructions

‘If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your mask first, and then help the other person.’ The gently authoritative voice fills the cabin as I watch the yellow mask drop from the flight attendant’s outstretched hand. ‘Pull the mask sharply, cover your nose and mouth, and put the strap over your head.’ It’s a soothing sound, someone in control explaining how to handle an emergency. I look over at my husband. I’m taking mental notes and he is selecting a movie to watch.

I’ve got thirteen hours of flying time before me, I know the brace position, I know where my nearest exit is and I am aware that, in case of evacuation, I need to leave my personal belongings behind. I am such a keen listener, some may call it neurotic, I even know to put my hands on my knees in the event that I have to use the emergency slide.

My husband probably knows all this but he doesn’t really care, he is of the firm belief that if it ever comes to needing it, none of this is really going to make a difference.

Six hours into the flight and I’m ratty, I’ve sobbed through A Man Called Otto, fallen in love with a Marcel The Shell With Shoes On and eaten so many salty snacks I have stopped producing saliva. I click open a Bustle article about therapy speak I’ve been saving. I’ve heard so many hot takes on it I’ve already formed an opinion, which is good because I don’t have wifi and so I can’t actually read it.

It may be because I’m flying 11 000 kilometres to attend a funeral, it could be the altitude but my mind is already irritated about the over abundance of therapy speak. I think about the hundreds of people I watch on social media telling their followers about the importance of boundaries, the thousands of memes spouting the importance of self care. I feel my teeth clenching as I think about people with little to no life experience giving advice on mental health to the strangers who’ve clicked the “ask me anything” box on their Instagram stories.

I’m convinced that the problem with the liberal use of therapy speak is that people have become so self-involved, so reliant on the buzz words of therapy to ‘make clear boundaries’ and to ‘nurture their own inner child’ that they have forgotten to think about other people — their inner children, their boundaries, their shitty childhoods and trauma.

I want to discuss this theory with my husband but his boundaries are so clear he’s got earphones on and is deep into watching a movie that looks so violent I am tempted to tell him it’s triggering me. Luckily I remember that I don’t have to watch his screen.

I focus on the flight attendant who also has clear boundaries and a job to do, so I am left on my own and I wonder when we started listening to flight safety instructions and transferring their meaning to our everyday lives. When did putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others become life advice? When did it become okay to tell people to fit their own oxygen masks before helping others when they are not even on a plane and the oxygen mask is metaphorical?

Why don’t we tell people who are feeling exhausted or overwhelmed to take a moment to locate their nearest exit? Or to stow away their tray tables and return their seats to the upright position? Maybe it would be handy to teach them the brace position or to remind them, in the event of evacuation, they should leave all personal belongings inside and remember their life jacket has a whistle and a light.

But we don’t do that. Increasingly we tell people to think of themselves first, to look after themselves before extending that kindness to others. We watch strangers with no qualifications telling us how to behave with our families, our loved ones, our employers, our community at large.

At the risk of signing off like Carrie Bradshaw, I have to wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off if we stopped thinking of ourselves as more important than the people around us. And maybe, at the same time, we shouldn’t equate the dropping of air cabin pressure with the importance of kindness.