On the other hand, it no longer takes months to travel West and half your family generally doesn't die of dysentery on the way there.
Most people were merely moving from house to house, sometime town to town. It was not frequent, and everybody knew it would take time so there was not that much time pressure.
Today, a lot of people are expected to be able to travel hundreds of miles, regularly, in short period of times, with not that much rest between those times, and be on schedule. Schedule that is precise to a few hours.
Appart from nomads and a few merchants (again traveling a way slower pace, frequency and lower expectations), most people just stayed put.
And yet the state of modern air travel is such that it's a still a toss-up which is worse.
While you are moving, the speeds are far lower--70 mph rather than 350-550 knots. The safety factor is lower; you're more likely to die in a car wreck than a plane wreck per distance unit.
But there's also no security queue or baggage check for a road trip. There's no airport ground transportation. There is a form of check-in for seat determination, but online and other early check-ins are specifically disallowed by the "shotgun rules". You save a fixed amount of time per trip with car travel, while airliners save time based on total trip distance.
So for me, airline travel beats car travel only beyond a certain distance threshold, which more or less directly equates to the travel time. I now set my threshold at two days. If I can't drive there within two travel days, I fly, or just don't go. Which means I'm now potentially adding hotel room charges to mileage expenses. That's about a 1000 mile radius for "easy" driving days and 1600 miles for "hard" driving days, which require relief drivers.
This is directly driven by my perceived worsening of the air travel experience. Sorting the customers out into service tiers based on how much they spend does not encourage me to spend more or to be loyal to a specific airline. It encourages me to pursue alternatives to the bad service that I know I will get.
One of my big life rules is "don't feed pigeons." I mean it metaphorically, of course. Pigeons are machines for turning food into pigeon shit and more pigeons, and I'm not a big fan of either. A clearer version is something like, "don't reward something creating a problem in a way that deepens the problem."
So you've persuaded me that I should never join one of these things.
They've structured it to be shitty because that's what the market wants: the lowest cost product. When I fly the major carriers, I often still see the "premium economy" seats available for purchase at check-in. Those cost an extra $50-100 to get extra legroom, early boarding, etc. These are the same perks that they provide for free to their entry-level frequent fliers.
It turns out that most people just aren't willing to pay 10-20% extra for a better experience. They'd rather buy the cheapest ticket, suck it up for a couple hours, and grouse about how bad air travel is afterwards.
By not joining a frequent flyer program, you're not stymieing them or anything. Non-loyalty customers looking for the lowest price is their bread and butter for filling up the back half of the plane. The service will be perfunctory and the experience will be marginal, because that's what most people are willing to pay for.
Truer words were never spoken. I had to book a Spirit flight home unexpectedly, and while I'd heard nothing but bad things about them, I found it a perfectly acceptable experience. Of course they charge for everything -- the ticket was $100 cheaper than United. Where do people think that discount comes from?
Kind of. It's what the current market wants. But through anticompetitive mergers and deregulation, the airlines have lobbied and gamed the laws to create a market tilted heavily towards their own preferences, that the public overwhelmingly hates.
The Amish around me were allowed to have electricity, but it could not be inside the house.
So they built a porch, turned it into a greenhouse looking room, and put all their electronics out on it. I have seen a refrigerator, laptop, and even a TV on their porch.
They also had electricity doing some stuff in their barn. I think it was mainly lights but I never went in there, just saw lights on 24/7. They milked the cows by hand (so I was told), plowed the fields with horses (unless they were harassing a local farmer to use their tractor and equipment), and lived like the textbook amish family.
They came from Pennsylvania right before buying the farmland. So I have no idea if they came from a particular sect that allows that, or what. I just know from talking with them (being neighbors and all), they were allowed to have certain stuff, just not allowed to have it in specific places.
I had several amish neighbors like this too. Nice people though except when they assumed they could use your farming equipment without asking and would get extremely defensive if you said no. That was just the fathers though. The wives and children were really great.
But yeah, status, PreCheck, Clear, etc. are all "Can I remove this friction in my life?"
There is nothing I do in my life regularly where I'm more restricted, or more closely related to a rigid caste system than air travel.
Every time you take a flight, for somewhere between 3 and 20 hours, you're told exactly where to stand, where to sit, what you can and can't wear, what you can and can't carry.
Almost everything about frequent flyer status is about making these limitations slightly less terrible. You're still going to be stuck in a shitty seat for several hours, but your seat might have slightly more legroom. You're still told when you can get on the plane, but you'll be at the front of the line. You still have to go through an invasive security process, but you'll go quicker, and it'll be slightly less invasive.
Most of these are stupid little things (and there are other much more objectively valuable perks, like waived change fees, improved options in the event of cancellations or delays, free checked baggage and the like), but in the artificial, restrictive and status-driven world of air travel, they're so nice to have.
All that said, I still think Southwest is the best domestic airline to travel and not be treated like a complete peon, assuming you don't fly enough to earn status with a traditional carrier.