Thanksgiving week is the busiest travel period of the year, the time when the most people go the most places. Before the pandemic, images of overflowing terminals and clogged highways were just as much part of holiday imagery as turkey and stuffing. Too many times to count, I promised myself I wouldn’t commute from Boston to New York on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or the Sunday afterwards. Every year I did, and every year I complained.
Now that people are starting to fly again, a trend that I noticed before the world powered off has resumed: people my age absolutely refuse to check a bag when they fly. This is true no matter the length of the flight, or the duration of the vacation. It applies for international trips just as much as domestic ones: a bias for the overhead compartment over the cargo hold. Talk to enough of these carry on people and you realize it’s not just a preference, but an ideological commitment. People who are otherwise easygoing become fanatics as soon as they start packing. Travelers who share this commitment refer to themselves as “onebaggers,” and share their carry on wisdom on websites and Instagram accounts.
At a time of declining religious affiliation, not checking a bag has acquired something like a religious fervor. This crusade against checked luggage manifests as insanity at the airport, where bags of increasing bulge are stuffed into compartments that have not gotten any larger. It also fuels confrontation at the terminal gate, where harried agents have to deliver the grim news that no, your rolling suitcase cannot accompany you on your flight to Phoenix. It makes for competition over who can take the most in the least space, who can be the savviest packer in the skies.
There are good reasons for the rise of this passion. Following American Airlines’ lead, charging for checked baggage is now de rigueur, and it never feels good to slide your credit card into those eerily lit kiosks. Airline travel is a chore as it is, and to pay extra for the privilege is the equivalent of being assigned the middle seat on the last row of a Southwest flight. The airlines are raking it in: $30 a bag goes a long way when flights are packed to the gills.
Then of course there is the dreaded wait by the baggage claim, a fluorescent lit lingering after a long flight when the urge to push through the revolving door and out into a different landscape is especially acute. The final peril of the checked bag is the possibility that it will abscond, or perhaps be filched from the conveyor belt by someone who *also* possesses a black Samsonite.
All of this is to say that checking a bag is not the great and glorious lost cause that needs defending. But I do think that the obsession with keeping luggage close at hand speaks to something bigger and larger: a mistrust of institutions, a prizing of the individual over the collective, and a relentless emphasis on autonomy of action over dependence on process and the collective. We are a generation that wants the curated and the bespoke, the convenient and unattached, to skip the line and be ahead of the curve. To check a bag means exchanging the pleasure of being taken care of for the joy of being on your own. It means swapping the fixed for the flexible.
There is simply no reason to insist on only a carry on for a long haul flight, or to deprive yourself of what you’ll need at the destination so that you can be marginally lighter during the voyage. There is no extra credit for taking only a backpack when a suitcase is required, or forcing luggage above when there is plenty of room down below. Our illusions of self-reliance are just that, and the victories we claim over the system are often Pyrrhic, wars of stress we wage with no audience but our own demanding selves. So wary of being taken in for a penny that we obsessively weight the pounds so as not to be over the limit.
Have a happy Thanksgiving weekend, whatever the things you carry and wherever you go. And thank you for this community of writing and reading- it is one of the things I am most grateful for this year.
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