Modern life is filled with mediocrity, so why do people single out flying?

Perhaps when travelers vent, they are articulating their frustration about having spent a lot on a big-ticket item—flights, after all, aren’t cheap, and flying remains a privilege in the first place—and yet still not being able to buy good treatment. When I spoke to Ritchie King, a reporter for FiveThirtyEight, he called the contemporary airline experience “a surreal business transaction,” akin to having gone out to a restaurant and ordered “Eggs Benedict and paid for it, only to have the server tell you that you’ll have to come back the next night for a soggy roasted-vegetable wrap instead.” In few other transactions are the rules quite so Alice In Wonderland-ish.

Or perhaps a complaint on social media is a kind of humblebrag, a backhanded way of announcing, “I am comfortable enough to fly, even though I may not be rich enough to fly in style.”

William McGee, the author of Attention All Passengers, agreed with me that flying evokes our fury—and our usually dormant class rage—like few other experiences. “Things are just fine in business class and first class. I don’t think that’s coincidental. It reflects the larger issues we face as a society right now, the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent. I’ve talked to execs about deteriorating conditions in the back and their response is basically, ‘You should pay for and sit up front,’ which is a bit of a ‘Let them eat cake’ response.”