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Air travel is one of the most frustrating travel experiences. Because in spite of being the fastest way to travel in theory, chances are that for your overall trip, 80% of the time is actually spent travelling to and from the airport, doing check in, baggage drop, security checks, and in a lot of cases waiting for delays, or often even just having extra time accounting for "In case something goes wrong."
While it kind of has to be this way for as far as the "commuting to the airport" part goes (airports make a lot of noise and necessarily have to be outside of city centres to some degree), I can indeed not help but wonder if a lot of the time we actually spend at the airport waiting to get on the plane and for it to depart are not actually necessary in all circumstances, just a result of air travel trying to function under capitalism.
Second - and most important - I cannot help but wonder why with all this overhead we couldn't do away with the whole "airplanes as a way to travel" thing and instead have improved railway networks which can actually get you anywhere in $Your_Continent, as long as there are no big masses of sea to cross, and while maybe taking overall more time to get to your destination, allowing you to hop on at a station, maybe do a couple of transfers at major hubs, but not have to worry too much once you are on the big high-speed one, and allowing you to not necessarily have to be super-restrictive about the size of your luggage and what you're bringing with you.
In summary:
I fucking hate airports.