Fixing a pain in the neck

On individual vs systemic problems

Neck pillows are a minor preoccupation of mine. I travel enough for work and spend enough time trying to sleep on uncomfortable airline seats that I’m always on the lookout for a good neck pillow. Believe me I have tried them all. There are the blow-up ones which are really cheap and take up zero space in your luggage – but they are not the most comfortable and the blow-up valve is prone to popping out. Then there are the memory foam ones - comfortable yet firm, they take up more space than the blow-up ones, but can roll up into a small-ish ball. They are pretty expensive though, and don’t provide enough support to stop my head dropping forward when I doze off. I recently found what seems like the best pillow so far. It wraps around my neck to support my head, and has a hood that comes over my eyes, to shut out the light. But it’s super expensive and pretty bulky, so it’s annoying to lug around on top of everything else - and it makes you look like a sci-fi character when you’re wearing it.

None of the options are great – and they never will be. The airplane neck pillow is the perfect illustration of a solution to the wrong problem -- the quest for an individual solution when the problem is a systemic or structural one. We don’t need better neck pillows — we need more spacious and more comfortable airline seats. We will only get better airline seats if we act collectively — to pressure airlines directly or to push for regulation resulting in better, more comfortable seats. And we will only act collectively if we see ourselves as having common interests as airline travelers who just want to arrive at our destinations feeling rested and healthy. 

The problem of uncomfortable airline seats is a privileged one to have, and pretty trivial given the dire threats facing the world right now — some of which my air travel is contributing to, I know. But there are more significant parallels everywhere: the push for individual recycling when what we need is less plastic packaging on almost everything; the measures we are told to take to protect our private data when the problem is tech companies run rampant; the marketing of alarms and fences and even guns in a quest for individual safety when what we need are societies where everyone has enough; the increasing prescription of pills for loneliness and depression when often what we really need is more connected communities and a sense of belonging. 

Individual solutions place the burden on each of us separately to sort things out, to mitigate harms. Often they leave us feeling guilty or inadequate — we blame ourselves for being unhealthy, for feeling lonely and isolated, for having our email account hacked. We failed to heed the advice, to earn enough, to just pull ourselves together. More importantly, individual solutions keep us distracted and separated. They’re a con. 

I’ll keep recycling, I’ve activated the privacy settings on my phone, and I’m hanging on to my new improved neck pillow: I need to look after my spine as best I can and I need to travel periodically for work. But every time I wrap that bizarre contraption around my head, I remind myself - there’s a bigger fight to be had. We have systems to change.