The other day I had an epiphany. Epiphany is too strong a word but I had a realization. You see, we have had this three-seater reclining sofa for a number of years now. The middle seat does not recline. No one wants to sit there and consequently it has been the resting place of TV remote, unopened mail, and whatever books or magazines that we are reading at the moment. Clearly, this is being underutilized.
It is not just on the sofa that the middle seat is less desirable. In a car, if someone has to sit in the middle of the back seat, it is quite uncomfortable. The hump in the middle of the floor forces you to have one leg on either side of it colliding with the feet of the passengers flanking you. Cars on the road mostly run with just one person inside so this is not a big issue perhaps. But that points out that the cars are underutilized. Ironically, in and around major cities, the roads are often jammed with cars but most of the cars have just one person occupying them.
The couch and car seat are trivial examples but I think they speak to a larger issue. There is a lot of unused capacity in what we own these days. Homes have grown in size over the years here in America with the average size of a newly built home increasing by as much as 50% over the last four decades. In many homes, the number of bathrooms exceeds the number of bedrooms, and I have to wonder if the house is moving into the hotel category. How much space we need may be a subjective issue. But how much of the house do we really use? I grew up in houses where the rooms served multiple purposes, as living/sitting/playing spaces during the day and transforming into bedrooms at night. Now we have dedicated spaces for living, dining, sleeping, home office, etc. which means that each room is only used part of the time.
We may not pay much attention to utilization when it comes to homes or cars. But there are industries where utilization is a major concern. Hotels want all their rooms to be booked. Airlines are very focused on filling every seat of their flights. They routinely overbook flights to allow for cancellations so that when the flight takes off, all the seats are occupied. They will offer upgrades and discounts to get them filled at the last minute. And full flights bring us back to that detested middle seat.
Travelling by public transport including airplanes does involve giving up one's personal space to some extent. Sharing that space with strangers does not come easy to people especially if they are used to all that excess space in their homes and cars. Long flights are exhausting in general. Unless you can afford to fly business or first class, you are going to be constrained and confined. With headphone wires, phone charging cables and laptops, one can barely move one's limbs, let alone get up and walk.
Occupying the middle seat in a plane is particularly torturous. If you are sitting in the aisle seat, you at least have some free space. The window seat offers a certain privacy if you can call it that. But in the middle seat, you are wedged between two others with very limited opportunity to move about. The window and aisle seats get their own armrests and you would think that the middle passengers should get two armrests to compensate for the extra inconvenience endured. But in practice, they have to fight the passengers on either side for the armrest. They should in all fairness be given a discount for all the discomfort. Of course, by charging extra for the other seats, one could argue that the airline is in effect charging less for the middle seats.
I recently read reports of innovative cabin designs for planes including one which eliminates the middle seat entirely while still providing the same or increased capacity. That sounds like a win-win solution to me. Of course these are at the concept stage and there is no telling when such designs will be implemented. But one can certainly hope. As things stand, even Buddha, who famously advocated the middle path, would hesitate to recommend the middle seat on airplanes.
On a personal level, I hope to find the golden mean between cramped seats and oversized homes. I am going to start by sitting in the middle seat of the sofa more often. I will also examine other aspects of my life. That will be my new year's resolution.
(April 14th is celebrated as the start of Solar New Year in India)
