Reclining on Planes & Trains: Just Ask
AU definitely doesn't want to talk about that Sixers-Nuggets game, so today he addresses something more important.
On Sunday’s Ricky, Spike and Mike summarized a discussion they’d had the prior pod about the morality of reclining your seat while on public transportation when there’s a person directly in back of you, based on a listener email about being in such a situation with another stealth Ricky listener.
“You think in all scenarios, that plane, train, whatever, that the person in front of you should never recline their seat,” Spike recalled as Mike’s take.
“I do think that,” Mike confirmed. “And I know that that’s...”
“It’s controversial,” Spike finished the thought.
And with that, we already have our frontrunner for 2026’s understatement of the year. It shouldn’t be that: If anything, discourse around something as relatively minor as transit etiquette should be uncommon enough that no takes could potentially register as commonly contentious. But ask any group of 10 people in a room for their thoughts on this subject, four will be violently pro, four will be offensively anti, and two will be so shocked and weirded out by the aggressive tenor of the debate that they’ll exchange nervous glances and silently plan their mutual exit strategy. Even in such naturally divisive times, the topic of reclining on planes and trains still has the power to split up parties on hard and intractable lines like no other subject I’ve ever encountered in casual conversation.
What’s more, unlike most matters of philosophical debate, it’s almost impossible to predict who in your life will end up on what side. I know plenty of people with whom I share 95% ideological overlap, but find myself so far apart from on this issue that it may as well represent the entirety of the remaining five percent. And the disagreement is never friendly: One friend of mine is among the sweetest, kindest, most open-hearted people I know, but suggest the possibility of taking away her right to recline with impunity and she reacts like a 65-year-old North Carolina senator presented a bill banning the sale or use of tobacco.
My stance on the matter is one of truly radical compromise: I say if you want to recline, just fucking ask the person in back of you first if it’s cool with them.
By nature, I am anti-reclining on trains and planes. I don’t do it and I generally resent people who do, particularly if they’re sitting in front of me, of course. The guy who called in to follow up on this on the last Ricky episode suggested that his research concluded that reclining on planes and trains doesn’t really affect the person behind you; if that is the common experience, it certainly ain’t mine. As a wide 6’3” man with big feet, mass transit is all but guaranteed to be somewhat uncomfortable for me, but it gets worse by multiple magnitudes the more someone chooses to recline on me. (And it is on me, directly and unignorably.)
All that said, however, I do understand that there’s people out there smaller than me who are less affected by being reclined on. There are also probably people who are better than me at sleeping comfortably on trains or planes — something I am largely incapable of doing, regardless of how my body is angled — and get more out of the practice of reclining themselves than I do. I get that. Unlike the pro-reclining people I’ve talked to — most of whom are offended by the mere notion that anyone could have say in whether or not they recline other than they themselves — I am willing to allow there is nuance and larger context to be had in this debate. I’m firmly anti-reclining, but not so firm that I consider it an inflexible, universal stance. There’s potential for compromise. There’s room for dialogue.
But I can already hear the cries of outrage from the pro-reclining people as I type this. “We shouldn’t have to ask!” they wail, before echoing their most commonly cited line of defense: “If we aren’t supposed to recline then they wouldn’t have put the button there!” OK, so the presence of a button in a passenger seat means it’s automatically your prerogative to press it with absolute immunity from having to address any of the consequences of how pressing it affects the people around you? There’s usually a flight attendant call button on planes too, does that mean you should be able to push that as often as you want without regard for how much it’s probably annoying the attendant who has to keep responding to it? Do you also think it’s fine to open your backseat car window when it’s 30 degrees outside, despite how the cold will undoubtedly bother the other folks in the car, simply because there are power buttons by your arm rest? Why does the presence of one button suddenly turn half of all travelers into George Mallory?
Again, I don’t suggest that this means you should never be able to press said button. Certainly, if no one’s in back of you — an admittedly rare situation in modern air or rail travel, but not an altogether extinct one — go nuts. And if someone is in back of you, I think you can still use it, as long as you do them the simplest courtesy of checking in with them before doing so. “Hey, cool with you if I recline a little bit?” That’s it. Doesn’t need to be a big thing. Just 10 words to show the person behind you that you recognize that they are indeed a person, with feelings and dignity and knees, and that you are at least the slightest bit concerned with how your actions might affect them.
Submit this to pro-reclining people, and they’ll probably respond like you suggested they should have to ask for permission before registering to vote. “What if they say no?” they’ll shriek in horror. “I should be allowed to recline if I want to recline! There’s no rules against it!”
Well, if you ask like I’m suggesting, very few people are ever actually gonna say no. People generally abhor conflict, particularly in already socially uncomfortable situations like mass transit; chances are they’ll just grumble that it’s fine and immediately return to staring at the TV or computer screen of the person across the aisle one row up. I hate being reclined on, but do I hate it enough to make A Thing out of it? In the great majority of such situations, probably not — and anyway, I’d be so overwhelmed with gratitude at someone actually treating me with any degree of humanity before trying to plow their seat through my lower body that I’m sure I’d agree happily to whatever they asked of me. At the end of the day, it’s not even really the reclining that I hate so much as the idea that my thoughts on the matter aren’t worth a second’s consideration from the pro-recliners directly in front of me; show me a little compassion there and we’ll likely be fast friends even through my physical discomfort.
But fine. Let’s say the probably single-digit-percentage chance of someone causing a stink and outright declining your recline request is simply too much downside for you to even consider the possibility of granting them that power. I think even there, there’s room for compromise. I believe that if you were to say something like “I’m gonna recline a little bit, I hope that’s OK” to the person in back of you — not technically granting them any kind of implied veto power — that would still satisfy a certain baseline of civil decency. Or hell, even say, “I’m gonna recline for a little bit, sorry about that.” At the very least, you’d be acknowledging to this person that they are a participant in this situation, and expressing some degree of caring about their comfort or lack thereof. Not your top priority clearly, but it’s something.
Even that will be too much to ask of the majority of pro-recliners. They don’t just demand the ability to recline if and when they so desire, they reserve the right to do so completely on their own terms, without introducing a single other perspective into the situation. And this to me speaks primarily to two motivating factors:
1. They don’t want to have to speak to a stranger
2. They know deep down that they’re doing something a little bit rude and don’t want to have to verbally acknowledge it
As for No. 1 — fair play. Talking to strangers when you don’t absolutely have to is generally the worst, you’ll get no argument from me there. (Though I would argue that if the reclining outcome is really so important to you, approximately six seconds of Stranger Talk isn’t necessarily a super-unreasonable price of admission.)
No. 2 I’m less sympathetic towards. I think if you really believed that you were 100% justified in reclining on a person, you wouldn’t mind talking about it with them first so much. If you’ve got a window seat and you’re trying to go to the bathroom, would you just attempt to wordlessly get past the people next to you, or would you apologize for inconveniencing them while doing so, maybe ask them if it’s OK if you squeeze by them real quick? It’s almost certainly the latter, and that’s for two reasons, one of which is that ultimately, you know they don’t really have any right to deny you — you have a matter of biological urgency that clearly and easily outweighs their second or two of discomfort adjusting themselves to let you through. You can ask for permission because it’s the polite thing to do, and because you’re comfortable in the knowledge they don’t have a leg to stand on if they try to say no. Reclining is no such matter of biological urgency, it’s just a matter of prioritizing your own maximum comfort over that of the person sitting behind you. And deep down — not even deep down, shallow down really — you know it.
But the second reason also gets at the real reason the pro-recliners don’t want to have to ask for your permission, or acknowledge you at all in the reclining process: because they can recline without having to do any of that. If you’re trying to get past your seatmates and into the aisle, there’s no way to do that without coming into obvious contact with them, facing them directly, perhaps even making some kind of eye contact. But the insidious thing about train and plane reclining is that you can do it while pretending the person in back of you doesn’t even exist. You’re facing the other direction, and the seat itself acts as a natural barrier between you and them. You can basically do whatever you want to them and tell yourself that it’s of no real consequence, because you can’t see any direct evidence to the contrary. To have to speak to them would break that illusion. It would acknowledge that your actions impact those around you. Couldn’t risk that, certainly.
It probably sounds like I’m coming down pretty hard on the character of the pro-recliners at this point, so let me zoom out now to say to groups on both sides of the issue: This is what they want us to be doing. It was a pretty big lightbulb moment for me listening to the last pod, when Mike suggested that the true villains in this situation weren’t the anti-recliners or the precliners, but of course the airlines and passenger rails who’ve made such travel so automatically cramped in the first place, while making any alternative options prohibitively expensive. And rather than us all demanding better of them, the recline button gets us all turning on one another, gets us all scrapping for what little bits of comfort or autonomy still remain in such already dignity-stripped spaces. I’m annoyed with myself that in the hundreds of hours I’ve spent seething about this issue over the years, I never considered how we should all be fighting the real enemy, but better late than never I suppose.
So I’m willing to call it even from here with the pro-recliners. I’ve suffered in silence for nearly 40 years on this — well, not always in silence, but I’ve suffered, anyway — but I can let that go. Just meet us halfway on this. Make it a conversation. Let us have input in the situation, however perfunctory and ultimately meaningless. Us anti-recliners won’t be dicks about it, or at least we’ll try not to be. There are too many situations in this world already where we’re solely concerned with our rights to do what we want for our own personal ease and comfort without regard for how it affects those around us. Let’s not give the powers that be the satisfaction of us seething at each other when we should be reserving our hate for them, for making us fight over such meager margins. Let’s figure out a way to be human in this thing together. And let’s save our most virulent takes for controversies slightly more deserving of such passion.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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