A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary - Alain de Botton

I was reminded of the Roman philosopher Seneca's treatise On Anger, written for the benefit of the Emperor Nero, and in particular of its thesis that the root cause of anger is hope. We are angry because we are overly optimistic, insufficiently prepared for the frustrations endemic to existence. A man who scream every time he loses his key or is turned away at an airport is evincing a touching but recklessly naive belief in a world in which keys never go astray and our travel plans are invariably assured.

I know, at least in theory, that Norcock could not always, in every circumstance, be a model of authoritative and patriarchal behaviiour. He, too, must be capable of petulance, of vanity, of acting foolishly, of making casually cruel remarks to his spouse or neglecting to understand his children. There are no directional charts for daily life. But at the same time, I was reluctant to either accept or exploit the implications of this knowledge. I wanted to believe in the capacity of certain professions to enable us to escape the ordinary run of our frailties and to accede, if only for a moment, to a more impressive sort of existence than most of us will ever know.

Another man explained that he had been visiting his wife and children in London, but that he had a second family in Los Angeles who knew nothing about the first. He had five children in all, and two mothers-in-law, yet his face bore none of the strains of his situation.

'For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation.' Adam Smith, The Theoryy of Moral Sentiments (1759)

We may ask our destinations, 'Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious.  put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.'  Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.