A Non-Human Way to the Gate
Today marked my first international trip with real visa stakes — Germany to India — and something quietly strange happened along the way: I made it from check-in to gate without a single human interaction.
Not one. Boarding pass? Machine. Passport control? Machine. Bag drop? Machine. Every checkpoint, every stamp, every nod of approval that once belonged to a person in a uniform — handed over, apparently without fuss, to a screen and a sensor.
There was no queue to join, no officer to meet my eyes, no small exchange of have a good flight from someone who may or may not have meant it. Just me, my passport, and a series of quiet mechanical confirmations that I was, indeed, allowed to proceed.
It was efficient. Seamless, even. And yet — a little bit eerie. I love those small human interactions at checkpoints and counters. The fleeting ones. Where stories are told, and quietly made.
The Human Parade
And then I reached the gate.
After the long, echoing walk through Berlin airport — past the duty-free perfume clouds and the overcrowded charging stations — the humans arrived. In full force.
Let me be clear: I am not talking about the lounges, with their carefully curated quietness. I am talking about the gates. The hallways. The raw, unfiltered parade.
People, it turns out, are walking billboards. Polo Ralph Lauren shirts, freshly pressed. Adidas sneakers, blindingly white. Gucci and Chanel handbags swinging with quiet aggression. Wannabe Rolex watches catching the terminal light just so. Everyone dressed for an audience — and the gate, apparently, was the stage.
Then came the soundtrack. Loud phone calls generously shared with the entire departure lounge — important meetings, crucial people, decisions that could not possibly wait. Holiday-goers narrating their itineraries to anyone within earshot: the wonderful hotels, the unmissable restaurants, the really rather fabulous lives they were about to live. Group dynamics played out in real time — the subtle jostling, the name-dropping, the laughter pitched just a little too high.
No one reading. Every face lit blue by a screen. Full egos, endlessly on display.
And the machines? The quiet, indifferent machines that had shepherded me here without so much as a glance? They didn’t care. Not even slightly. No judgment, no raised eyebrow, no weary sigh.
Brave New World?
In that moment, I almost admired them for it.
And then I sat down, looked out at the tarmac, and wondered — where exactly are we heading? Not the flight. Us. All of us.
I’d spent the last week re-reading Huxley’s Brave New World. The gate at Berlin airport, it turns out, made an excellent companion read.
Huxley saw it coming, of course. The world he wrote about wasn’t a dystopia of iron fists and jackboots. It was softer than that. More seductive. A world of seamless comfort, frictionless living, and just enough distraction to keep everyone perfectly, contentedly numb. A world where the machines hum quietly in the background and the humans perform loudly in the foreground — consuming, displaying, broadcasting.
Sound familiar?
It felt, just for a moment, like a small preview. The technology, impeccably efficient and utterly indifferent. The people, magnificent in their self-absorption. Everyone moving forward, no one really going anywhere.
But brave? That’s the word I keep snagging on. Is any of this actually brave? The Rolex on the wrist, the Chanel bag on the shoulder, the important call that couldn’t wait — is that courage, or just noise? And the quiet surrender to the machines, checkpoint by checkpoint, screen by screen — is that progress, or something we haven’t quite found the right word for yet?
I don’t have an answer. Just a boarding pass, a comfortable window seat, and a long flight ahead.