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I'm reminded of a song by Cake; Tougher Than It Is. [1]

Some people are so high-strung and high-maintenance, I don't know why they do it to themselves. Perhaps their career path rewards this behavior, and they become so obsessed with success as defined by their career, whatever that means, that it becomes their entire identity. Because the way Thayer is approaching life sounds a whole lot like the way people behave in corporate america. Thayer Prime would probably benefit from eating some mushrooms in the forest.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjL07JQ5cLo

edit: By mushrooms I mean the kind that educates, not kills.



I would just think, "this person didn't arrive on time and it pisses me off", then if they did it again, I'd be like, "I don't even want to meet this person that much - I'll just never make another meeting".

Sounds like she's just put a number scale on what most people do intuitively.

I don't think it's too high-strung or high-maintenance to expect people to be reasonably on-time.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the article. The real good stuff is in the comments. -10 points for not reading the article for me.


I can see that, but it greatly depends on the context.

The thing is, my date or friend being late for something like a dinner or cafe meetup is of little consequence. I'm not going to be sitting there twiddling my thumbs stewing in anger bored out of my mind because of it, because I presume we were doing something I genuinely wanted to do wether they were a participant or not. Their presence was just to enhance the experience, we were going to share an experience as a means to enhance it and get to know one another. There is zero urgency for this to have happened precisely that way at that time, and the cost of it not happening exactly as planned is insignificant.

If we were supposed to be pouring a cement foundation and they showed up an hour late and I couldn't get it all poured and finished before it started setting in their absence? Ok, that friend is getting taken down a notch if it were clear they were needed and they had committed.

From what little I know, Thayer Prime strikes me as someone who is not particularly aware of the importance of context with expectations, and is applying the same level of obsessive anal retentiveness she uses professionally uniformly throughout her life.

If my friends are late for social activities, I just pull out a book and hang out wherever we wanted to go - because I wanted to go there. Maybe they'll show up, and that'll be great. If not, well at least we spend time at places I like to be anyways!

Sometimes it seems like some people date just to force others to fulfill their expectations, and their whole world is shattered when those expectations aren't met in the slightest way. Life is so much more than that, it's absurd to me. shrug


I'd argue that obsessing about timeliness is of itself evidence of being high-strung or high-maintenance.

On-time is... sometime that day. Or perhaps tomorrow. Later than that is significantly late, but why worry about an hour or two? It really is a very, very particular western culture thing to be time-obsessed: it's not specifically something that all humans do intuitively.


> sometime that day. Or perhaps tomorrow.

That would be fine, and honestly I'd be much happier if my work was like that.

But my free time is limited and I have to be at work at 9am on Monday, no matter how long I wait for a selfish person to turn up. So I'm not going to sit there waiting for long...


A friend of mine moved from the East Coast to teach college in Idaho, and he made the comment that punctuality just wasn't a thing out that way. He's a historian, and he surmised that it was because Idaho never had its society fundamentally altered by industrialization and the time-keeping it required.

But yeah, I try not to get hung up on other folks' timeliness, unless there's going to be a knock-on effect. I know shit happens. I bring a book so I can put my time to good use if I have to wait. An obsession with punctuality in and of itself might be a sign that a person is optimizing what's measured rather than what's actually important.


For what it's worth, mushrooms are pretty hard to enjoy if you're a friendless 30+ alone in the forest.


Depends on the psilocybin content of said mushrooms.


Depends on the individual. If you’re using it for entheogenic purposes, then the forest is a great place to enjoy it. I’m reminded of the image of a Buddhist monk meditating under a waterfall in quiet contemplation.


What I mean is sometimes you find out you're the Buddha and sometimes you find out you're a lonely, pudgy 35 year old doing drugs in the woods and wondering how you're going to come down in time to get to the office in the morning. You imagine you're going to go out and meditate in a garden full of friendly animals, but the nature of tripping is that the non-tripping mind cannot predict the experience with any kind of fidelity. Especially if you're 35 and haven't found a free day to go do it since you were 25, due to mortgages and whatnot.


It's just a useful way to transport your mind into a somewhat arbitrary perspective. Often that leads to forced introspection looking back on the perspective you've come to live normally in, and that might help make some productive changes if you don't quite like or appreciate what you see.


> Thayer Prime would probably benefit from eating some mushrooms in the forest.

Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to wish death upon her.


I think GP means the psychedelic kind.


I mean, foraging for mushrooms is a really dangerous hobby that's really easy to screw up and kill yourself doing, is what I was getting at it.


That is not at all what I was implying. Edited to clarify.




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