Personal Space

I just saw another post on Facebook about the horrors of air travel. This time, it was the fact that someone on the plane was sneezing, and the aggrieved victim caught a cold.
I don’t know what the solution to this would be short of designing airline seats as cubicles, with divider panels between each one, or maybe a plastic bubble coming down from the ceiling placed over people’s heads, like in a beauty salon. Either of these might make things awkward for parents with children, or people who actually enjoy talking to strangers on a plane. (I’m like that. You meet some fascinating people traveling)
Same deal as on buses and trains.
Bottom line, some people don’t like being too close to other people. Which is fine, I suppose. There’s plenty of free space in the world. If you get out of the city, there are places where you can look off into the distance and your line of sight, stretching all the way out to the horizon, will be devoid of human life. Even here, in my small flat in a big city, the only other person I’m aware of at the moment is my wife, and she’s in another room.
We have plenty of space. People bitch about crowds, but tens of thousands of them will show up to fill an arena to listen to a rock concert, or pack a stadium for a sports event, or to march for a common cause. And we tend to congregate in cities, while there is plenty of free space outside of them.
So, which is it? Do people love other people or do people hate and fear other people. A bit of both, I guess, and it changes from person-to-person, moment to moment.
We could stand to be a little bit less hysterical about it, though.