He said he’d never done anything like that before and had never thought about doing it, but since his seating situation was less than ideal he thought he’d give it a try.
“I’m a big guy, so I sat down and the guy in the middle seat was twice my size,” he said. “The middle seat was awful, it was uncomfortable, so I gave him the armrest and sat with my arms crossed to avoid hitting the cart. I felt so miserable, I thought, ‘Oh man, at this point I’m just going to go all out, I’m not going to wear headphones, I’m not going to sleep.'”
Fierstein, who refused any beverage offers from flight attendants (“I wouldn’t recommend going without water, especially on a long-haul flight,” he says), didn’t find the experience making him feel like a new traveler.
“I’d like to say I learned some lesson, or had some revelation, or emotional growth from this experience,” he said. “I gained nothing. Absolutely nothing. A two-and-a-half-hour flight felt like a four-hour flight.”
But he (half) joked that sitting in complete silence could be a kind of penance that any traveller could partake in.
What does he think about the trending names? “I think it’s very funny,” he said.
It’s a sentiment that’s been circulating on social media, with people jumping on both the concept itself and the discussion surrounding it.
One person suggested that this might be specifically male: “I could be wrong about this, but I recall the University of Pennsylvania doing a study on this and finding that men’s brains enter a ‘resting state’ more frequently than women’s, basically confirming that men can actually go without thinking for longer periods of time.” (The authors of the study they referenced seemed to deny that this was actually a finding of their study.)
