2 ms·
At least for me there's a feeling of autonomy. If a plane crashes, there's very little that I as a non-superman can do to stop that from happening (with me ins
by existencebox 10y ago
At least for me there's a feeling of autonomy. If a plane crashes, there's very little that I as a non-superman can do to stop that from happening (with me inside it.) While driving, I can trust my own reflexes, awareness, and decision making to put myself in better or worse situations. Now this may still absolutely be a false perception, but this is where the feeling is rooted for me (from lengthy introspection on similar situations when I used to do trick-skiing and never really questioned my safety, but would be very hesitant to e.g. skydive).
To some degree I think it's potentially also "failure magnitudes." Having been in a handful of very minimal car crashes, that calibrates my "something goes bad" prior to a not very impactful bar; whereas if something goes wrong on a plane, it can go VERY VERY wrong. Again, this is likely a false perception due to observations of outlier events in both cases and sparsity of signal, I'm just trying to question the origin of my feelings.
- mortenjorck 10y agoThere's this thing that will happen to me when I doze off as a passenger in a car: When I wake up, there's often a split second of panic between the visceral understanding that I'm in a moving vehicle and the slightly delayed recollection that I'm not the one responsible for driving it. Somehow, this turned into a problem for me when flying (even though I'm not a pilot). I wake up, I instantly know I'm moving at 500 miles per hour through the air, then I have a singular panic of being in a vehicle not under my control. This has only happened once – I haven't slept on a plane since.