When schedules matter more than souls
There’s a video circulating of a recent airline flight.
It begins mid-chaos:
A woman, clearly intoxicated, is shouting profanities in the aisle.
She lunges toward another passenger and grabs her hair.
It’s loud. Ugly. Disturbing.
Only then do the flight attendants intervene fully.
But passengers commenting later were clear:
They should have acted sooner.
They had been aware of her condition before the outburst.
But their concern—above all—was staying on schedule.
“Please take your seat.”
“Ma’am, you’re delaying departure.”
“Ma’am, we can’t leave until…”
Not:
“Are you okay?”
“Why are you in this state?”
“Who failed you before you got on this plane?”
This wasn’t just a moment of chaos.
It was a window into something deeper—
an ordinary encounter in a system that has quietly replaced care with control.
And that’s when the deeper truth cracked open:
In this system, the schedule matters more than the soul.
Even when someone is clearly unwell.
Even when others are at risk.
Even when a disruption is growing in plain sight.
This is not just an airline issue.
It is a symptom of a civilization that has been financialized to the root.
Where the sacred is measured in time slots.
Where harm is real only if it delays operations.
Where the ultimate sin is not violence or suffering,
but interrupting the workflow.
This woman was a disruption, yes.
But she was also a revelation.
She showed us what happens when people break
under a system that sees them only as units—
passengers, not persons.
And she showed us what the system fears most:
not her rage, but her delay.
We used to “fly the friendly skies.”
Now we are freight.
We are scanned, sorted, boarded, contained.
Measured by weight, cost, and compliance.
No longer passengers with stories, fears, or moments of weakness—
just units in a transport algorithm.
If you weep? You’re delaying the schedule.
If you panic? You’re threatening revenue.
If you misbehave? You’re a security incident, not a person in pain.
The woman on the plane wasn’t treated as a troubled human being.
She was treated as leaking cargo.
Something to be strapped down, silenced, and moved.
Freight does not cry.
Freight does not hope.
Freight is not asked what it needs.
It is measured, moved, and monetized.
And it’s not just airlines.
It’s everywhere.
Self-checkout lanes that erase human interaction.
App-based “telehealth” that flattens care into five-minute diagnosis windows.
Automated HR platforms that filter resumes by keyword and discard the rest.
“Doc-in-a-box” medicine where the priority is not your health, but billable units.
Customer support bots that pretend to help while keeping you away from anyone who could act.
Even when humans are still present, they are scripted—bound by metrics, policies, and fear of termination. What was once a job in service becomes a role in containment. You are not a customer. You are a variable.
This is what financialization has done:
It has taught every institution to treat humans like problems.
And now, even we do it to each other.
We see someone crying in public, and we wonder:
“How long will this delay me?”
We are not just delayed.
We are denied love.
And still we call it normal.
We’ve internalized the market.
We’ve begun to treat ourselves like freight.
What we’ve lost is more than courtesy.
It’s more than comfort.
What we’ve lost is the public ethic of care—
the idea that human beings deserve dignity,
even when they’re inconvenient.
Especially when they’re inconvenient.
In a world that still had a soul,
the woman on that flight wouldn’t have been ignored until she became violent.
Someone would have noticed.
Someone would have paused.
Someone would have said, “She’s not well. Let’s help.”
But pausing is expensive.
Help takes time.
And the schedule—always the schedule—is sacred.
So we move faster.
We dehumanize more.
We shrink every interaction down to a transaction.
And the ones who cry out in public—
the broken, the loud, the unwell—
are now seen as failures of the system,
rather than its clearest truth.
Because they reveal what we’re all holding in:
the grief, the fear, the rage of being treated like livestock
in a culture that once called itself free.
They are not the disease.
They are the symptom.
The system is the disease.
And if we don’t name it—
if we don’t reclaim a vision of life where people matter more than metrics—
then more will snap.
More will suffer alone.
And the machine will call it “operational excellence.”
So now we face a choice.
Do we continue like this—
moving faster, caring less,
accepting a world where being human is a liability?
Do we keep adjusting to the inhuman,
measuring our worth in productivity,
training ourselves not to feel what the system can’t monetize?
Or do we stop?
Do we look at the woman in the aisle,
at the man who’s weeping in his car,
at the child who acts out in school,
and finally say:
This is not a failure of individuals.
This is a failure of the system.
A system that treats people as inventory.
A system that punishes the very things that make us human—
grief, uncertainty, vulnerability, slowness, care.
We were not meant to live like this.
We are not freight.
We are not units.
We are not problems to be managed.
We are passengers on a shared journey.
And the only flight worth boarding
is one where every soul matters—
not just the ones who stay quiet and fit neatly into the manifest.
There will come a day when the schedule breaks,
and in the silence that follows,
we will remember what it means to be human.
Not freight, not data, not delay—
but presence, wild and unmeasured,
refusing to be moved except by love.