Like the author of the blog mentioned in this post, I too find it hard to wake up in the morning. But, so what? I don't feel pity for myself or try to blame my desire to sleep longer on a "disease". This blog post really hits the nail on the head.
That isn't an excuse to stop trying—there are things you can do that often help: a combination of correctly timed melatonin and light therapy can shift your circadian rhythm back towards normal. Nonetheless, it's an actual medical condition.
To everyone else: if you think you have this problem, do something about it. There's a healthy chance you can fix it.
And since it's easy for you to overcome that problem, it must mean everyone else who struggles with it must not be trying. It can't possibly be harder for them than for you, after all!
If you're in a coma, is that your fault? If you have narcolepsy, is it your fault? If you wake up having hit a snooze button that you didn't consciously push, is that your fault? If you have a medical condition that makes it harder for you to wake up than for 99.8% of the population, is that your fault? There's a line somewhere, and I don't think the author of the original article crossed it.
It seems like you're pulling out all the stops to avoid the uncomfortable point: the vast, vast majority of us are normal and don't have a convenient excuse for our poor sleep habits.
>If you wake up having hit a snooze button that you didn't consciously push, is that your fault?
Absolutely. 1000%. Move your alarm. Hide it. Make it not turn off until you do math problems. Have a friend call you. Set your computer to set off such an unholy alarm that your neighbors will hear. Buy one of those alarm helicopters that flies around the room until you catch it. Do what you have to do.
It is your responsibility and yours alone to wake up early enough to meet the obligations that you made for yourself.
When you accept a job, or a meeting invite, you are making an explicit committment to a work schedule or an appointment. That is a personal committment that you chose to make. If you sleep through it, you failed your committment and should feel like it.
You're not. Go live amongst the trees and be a beautiful independent spirit and write a great American novel.
All this author is saying is that if you CHOOSE to make commitments and then fail to honor them, you're not an awful person, but yes you should feel guilty for that. On that, I agree.
There is a subtler point to be made that is (perhaps unintentionally) hinted at by the author of this article and sp332. At what point does a disruptive, repetitive, and persistent behavior go from being simple laziness or irresponsibility to a "disease"? If you believe that the mind is a purely physical thing and therefore that all behavior is the result of the body's composition and environment, then the only thing you can do is draw a line somewhere and call one group of behaviors "disease" and the other group "irresponsibility."
I think the point here is that everything today is considered a "medical condition". While that makes sense from a medical perspective, all it does is give people excuses for not dealing with their problems. "I can't get to work on time, I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome". "I can't focus in class, I have Attention Deficit Disorder". These are genuine difficulties that afflicted people will have to face, but don't ask the whole world to change to fit your circumstances.
Note, I was in and out of specialist children's hospitals for a good year or two while doctors tried to diagnose the reason my brain works differently to theirs. I have a certain set of psychological challenges I have to overcome, but I don't sit around whining about it all day.
all it does is give people excuses for not dealing with their problems.
Even the original article didn't do that. The author lists several steps he took to improve his condition. He just wanted people to avoid useless guilt, he didn't give them a free pass.
here's some specific quotes I'm taking aim at here:
She was so relieved simply to know that she didn’t have a problem; or more specifically, she was relieved to know that her problem was real. For she had gone all these years thinking that she was just lazy.
For all of those of you out there suffering under the weight of your inability to wake up early each morning, consider this one giant pardon.
the post comes off as one giant "it's ok to put your hand up and say 'I have a named medical condition so can I be excused from class'". That could just be my biased interpretation though as I've come across such a mindset before and tend to react very angrily to it. If that's not the message at all then consider my rant misplaced.
Why didn't the guy just post a link to his blog post in the comments on the other article? Maybe that is frowned upon on this site. Seems like the right thing to do to me.
But that has the feel of saying that Newton didn't invent calculus because of the work Archimedes did with infinitesimals. And in Turing's case it's without a Leibnitz-esque independent co-discoverer figure muddying the water.
Turing is the Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, and Michael Jordan of computer science.
Judging by the fact that the word "sissies" is in the title, I don't think Joe Conway has any interest in giving some gay person any credit. He's a real man, you know.
Plus, attacking other people as lazy doesn't mean you yourself have to put in the work to familiarize yourself with history before making historical claims. Going to the library is too hard for my generation.
Light therapy. Or, you know, modafinil works too. The answer isn't always 'man up', neither is it 'I am a victim'. Just treat it and move on with your life. You're not a hero for getting to work on time, but neither are you a villain for being late.
As someone who has used it for this exact purpose, it's enough to use it occasionally to enable you to keep your sleep schedule in check. If I don't manage my sleep schedule well, I end up waking up later and later, and having to loop over. Modafinil perhaps once a month allowed me to reset without having to burn a couple days being useless.
Rather than starting with modafinil, melatonin should probably be the first step. It might help, and people do not report tolerance after prolonged use the way they do for modafinil.
Melatonin is fine if it works for you, and you find the right schedule to take it on, and you don't get terrible nightmares from it. Somehow I usually meet 2 of those criteria at a time.
The world is a big place and everyone has their own circumstance. But I think the point of the Great Big Get-Off-My-Lawn Rant (which I loved) was more that for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of circumstances getting up in the morning doesn't rise to the level of a severe personal handicap.
I mean, I hate mornings as much as the next person, and have slept through a decent number of events. Yet still, when I had kids and had to get up for a crying baby or to change a diaper, I Just Did It, and didn't feel the need to blog about whether I should feel "guilty" about it.
I mean, really: don't we have more important things to argue about? Isn't there a new Javascript rendering abstraction layer or something?
Well, in my opinion, it's pretty crippling in 'polite society' not to be a morning person.
I've lost jobs over it, relationships, all sorts of fairly major personal issues.
My point is that there are solutions that enable people to fix this problem, if they are so inclined. This sort of excoriating article disregards the real pain people experience, and the other sort of article disregards the real issues that 'just never do anything in the morning and don't try to adapt' causes.
If hard work in excess happens to be one of the reasons you find it hard to get up in the morning, you may confidently disregard this post. It is not meant for you; if it actually is meant for those sorts (I am not the author), it shouldn't be.
I never imagined that the nerd-flame-war that would cause me to take a HN break was over waking up in the morning, and not about bashing some poor database or microbenchmark.
Actually, I think this post, which is also causing me to take an HN break, is not very surprising from that perspective. It highlights one of the worst tendencies of HN I've been worried about a while.
HN is actually quite good on technical issues. People disagree, but it's rarely completely idiotic. There is smart stuff, and information is exchanged, and the overall level of debate is good.
But on philosophical issues, it's frankly not very good. There is a lot of knee-jerk bigotry. I mean this post leads by calling people "sissies", a clearly homophobic term. It also has a complete disinterest in science, and is longer on trolling and provocation than reason or intelligence. It worked. Got to #1 on HN!
Simple sound-bites, strong opinions, and posts that I can only really describe as in the "lifehacking" genre on the one hand, or the "political/social provocation" genre on the other hand, are what's the worst about HN. These are usually embarrassing at best. And in the best case they get flagged off the front page. The moderators are also clearly worried, because provocative titles often get changed, which sometimes leads to the posts fizzling without being flagged. Reduces damage, at least.
Anyway, as you say, time for a break. I'm sick of Joe Conway and his ilk of arrogant, ignorant assholes. Before chiding other people for being lazy, maybe these ignorant fucks should get off their asses and visit a library. They aren't stupid, but they're ignorant. Science and intelligence is about more than blogging whatever comes to the top of your head after 10 minutes of thought. You need to read. You need to think a bit about whether the first reaction that comes to mind is correct: is this really the position you want to write a manifesto about? Do you have data to support your contention that an alleged condition is imagined and actually the people are just lazy losers, and "suck it up" is a good prescription? Or are you just expressing a reactionary, right-wing political view borne more out of politics and prejudice than rationality and evidence?
Since when did "sissies" become homophobic? I recall as a kid not even knowing what gay or homosexual was, i.e. the 80's, and being a sissy simply meant someone who was afraid or a "scardy cat". It was far more analogous to wimp then anything else.
It's calling a man effeminate as an insult. That's not solely used to stigmatize gay people, but that's one of its main uses, along with stigmatizing gender-nonconforming people. I don't see much of a way to salvage it as anything but a right-wing, culturally reactionary term, any way you spin it; at best, it's imagined-1950s-gender-role garbage.
It was used when I was a kid too. But when I was a kid, people also used the words "Jewed" and "Gypped" to mean "got ripped off", and "gay" to mean "bad". In retrospect those those were all... not so good. And now I'm an adult who is capable of reading and gaining knowledge about such things.
This post smacks of reactionary prejudice. Some people are different than me? Something must be wrong with them! I am better than you because I wake up before you! You have got to be kidding.
If this post was written 40 years ago it would be directed at women telling them they actually have it pretty good. Hmm wait I actually saw that same thing just the other day.
These ignorant arrogant people need to figure out why they don't have even a smidgen of empathy and quit blaming us for being "bleeding hearts".
I didn't like the tone of this article at all. I'll spare us all and put aside the causality vs. free will debate, but saying all of our actions are controllable is ridiculous.
If trying like hell not to have to wake up early in the morning makes someone a sissy, then I'm the king of sissies.
This reminds me of a quote from Crowfoot, once a chief of the Blackfoot tribe:
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
Life's short. Enjoy it. If that means not waking up at a certain time, then don't. But, also, don't complain when you have to deal with the consequences.
The author of this post comes across as a raging jackass. I'd never heard of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome until I read the other post, but it perfectly describes my life. I've never really known how to describe just how difficult it is to get up in the morning, but it is really, truly difficult.
Joe Conway, you said in your post that "every single one of your actions is controllable". If you truly believe this, you should demonstrate it by controlling your impulse to be an asshole.
Does flying to a different timezone incapacitate you or do you adjust in a few days? Does daylight savings time cause you problems or do you adjust like everyone else?
If you can adjust to those things, you can adjust your "normal" sleep cycle and you don't have this rare condition.
The reason you have a hard time getting up "early" is that you go to sleep too late. Just go to sleep an hour earlier than "normal". Too hard? Impossible? If that's so, how do you do it every year when we go off DST?
Well in my case, both of those things do really screw me over pretty hard. I have to allocate a couple days to reset my schedule on any timezone change or the 'spring forward'.
That said, it's not about going to bed earlier, at least for me. You can't solve it that way. What you have to do is stay up later and later, and eventually loop over to a 'normal' time. This involves several days of non-traditional sleeping hours or extreme exhaustion.
1. Patient has chronic difficulty falling asleep at desired time to meet their daily schedules - work, school, etc. Typically patient reports inability to sleep before 2 to 6 am.
2. The patient reports having dealt with these symptoms for at least six months, mostly for multiple years.
3 When not required to maintain their schedule--i.e. weekends, holidays, etc.--patient sleeps without difficulty, and will awaken spontaneously after a sleep period of normal length.
Exactly. Machines should do all the "hard work" that I do not want to do at any given time, allowing me to spend my life cruising. We don't innovate to continue "working hard", we do so to make life easier in some way.
Nope! I regularly spring out of bed feeling wide awake, well rested and ready to start the day a good hour or two before I need to get up to get to work on time, and that time immediately after waking up in the morning is often my favorite part of the day.
Of course, the flipside of this is that I'm often ready to pass out by 9 PM.
While I do appreciate the overall goal of the message, I must say that I completely disagree with his statement:
No one likes waking up in the morning.
I for one actually do like waking up early in the morning and have been like that as long as I can remember. I also have some friends who think like this as well, so be careful when making generalizations :)
I don't feel guilty for over-sleeping. I've worked out a life for myself where people don't care that I sleep until 11:00. I simply don't schedule meetings or appointments for the morning, or if there's absolutely one that can't be avoided, I go to bed early and set an alarm clock to wake up for it.
It is not being a sissy to know your limitations and preferences and to work around them. If you make a commitment to another person, you should keep it. But nobody is forcing you to make that commitment in the first place. Is it really impossible to schedule that meeting in the afternoon, or to not have it at all?
It's not the OPs place to say what sort of sleep habits other people should or should not have. If he finds them annoying, fine: don't work with them.
I doubt he'd have a problem with you. His issue seems pretty clearly to be with people who do not keep their commitments. If you don't start your day before 11 then obviously don't accept meeting invites before that time and you are golden. Oh wait, you work at a company where 9:00 meetings are normative? I guess that job is a commitment too, isn't it?
That does not seem at all clear to me. To me, the clear meaning is that he is addressing everyone who isn't a morning person, and merely using the case of bad-faith promises as an example of their evils. Based on the article, it's hard to imagine he'd feel differently even if the person did not promise to be there at 9 a.m., because — in his words — "earning your life is supposed to be difficult" and anyone who doesn't "put in the work" is "lazy."
<i>"But nobody is forcing you to make that commitment in the first place."</i>
The author's point is that many people with this "disorder" continue to make commitments they cannot keep. It is Jason Freedman who says "The one who can’t seem to consistently set the alarm clock for A.M. and not P.M. I know how it feels to be the undependable one."
If you are consciously aware of this, yet continue to make these commitments - then the author I believe argues you are a "lazy", "sissy."
Maybe I read it differently than you, but I read the article as spurred by someone that was habitually late for meetings. More generally, excuse making. Not any particular sleep cycle.
When saying "If you make a commitment to another person, you should keep it." I see you as being in agreement with the post I just read.
I read the original article as a PSA. It was basically saying "this thing exists and you shouldn't feel bad if you have it." I don't see where it was making excuses.
If you recognize that this is a real problem, you can take steps to fix it. Things like shifting your schedule or regulating blue light. Not just "don't be lazy" or "get off Reddit", that sort of attitude doesn't help.
You should read the original post referenced, because this article greatly misrepresents what that person said.
The original referenced material doesn't talk about making excuses. He talks about managing a real physical condition so that you don't miss meetings and don't have to make excuses. It's about understanding that having that condition doesn't make you lazy or a lesser person.
Any disorder is a problem to be solved by some, while being an obstacle which others let stop them. If it's important enough, you'll be there, awake and early.
By being late, you're communicating that your job isn't the most important thing in your life. If that's true, we should be honest about it.
Every generation is full of the weak and the strong. We're all weak in some ways and strong in others. We've learned to subsidize one another.
It's a common problem, and so worthy of a solution.
I'm not sure the "get over it" solution is working. It's accepted that developers will work without wearing full suits. This isn't different, maybe allowances should be made for productivity's sake.
Missing appointments is a different thing, and is unacceptable. Is day to day flexibility really that big of a problem?
I am pretty sure I have some version of DSPS, or maybe I am just a night owl. I've tried for years to fix it, going to bed hours earlier, locking my smartphone in a drawer, setting 12 alarms 2 minutes apart, taking pills. Nothing worked. Exercise helped a little, in that I was tired earlier in the day, but I am still useless until 10:00.
So you know what I did? I stopped trying to fix it. I realized that I might never be one of those people who get to work at 8am and I shifted my schedule. I am much happier now. This was the tone of the original article, and I take offense to this article telling me I am lazy.
I'll flip this one on the head: someone doesn't think it's their duty to adjust to your silly requirements just because a previous generation paid their tithes without complaining.
The entire point is, for many people "quitting reddit" is not going to help. At all. And if you don't get it, then boo-hoo, stop reading things that make you write silly rants.
The OP sounds like an angry curmudgeon. He/she can't cut someone some slack if they're running a few minutes late? I'm glad I've never had to take a meeting with this person. This isn't about whether or not someone is disciplined enough to get enough sleep - this is about OP's rigid inflexibility. Things happen - your child has a tantrum at breakfast and spills something on you, your car has a flat, your cat dies. If life's inconveniences are too much for OP, he/she should consider working solo.
My top tip for making sure you are not a zombie in the morning is:
Don't eat a late dinner. Eat before 7 pm.
Go to bed between 9.30 and 10.30 pm.
If you want, use the time before second sleep[1] to catch up on reading.
Get up when your alarm rings at 6 am. Every damn day.
These are all points you certainly can control yourself.
The saddest thing is how morning persons have managed to make a virtue out of their biological clock and that their preferences are so deeply ingrained in society now.
It's also an age thing. As you get older, your sleep moves in the early direction and you also need less of it (if you're in good health). My dad's 61 and sleeps 9-to-3:30. I seem to be headed in that direction. I'm usually up by 6-7 even if I go to bed at 2:30, so the smart thing for me to do is sleep earlier.
It's biology. Giving it a moral weight is nonsense.
> it does, you know, make sense to conduct society's business during daylight hours.
Not necessarily! In hotter parts of the world, they deliberately avoid conducting business during the middle part of the day. (That may come with earlier rising, offset by a siesta.)
Seriously? Would you say the same thing to someone who is suffering from PTSD? Just "man up" and get over it? No way, unless you're a complete idiot. It's easy to throw people down and attempt to discredit an attribute of "how their brain works" when you don't suffer from the problem. There is _no_ need to put people down in this manner.
This post is stupid. Not everything can be fixed with 'will power'. There are inherent physiological differences across people, you need to stop assuming that everyone else experiences the same 'reality' as you.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadThat isn't an excuse to stop trying—there are things you can do that often help: a combination of correctly timed melatonin and light therapy can shift your circadian rhythm back towards normal. Nonetheless, it's an actual medical condition.
To everyone else: if you think you have this problem, do something about it. There's a healthy chance you can fix it.
If you're in a coma, is that your fault? If you have narcolepsy, is it your fault? If you wake up having hit a snooze button that you didn't consciously push, is that your fault? If you have a medical condition that makes it harder for you to wake up than for 99.8% of the population, is that your fault? There's a line somewhere, and I don't think the author of the original article crossed it.
It seems like you're pulling out all the stops to avoid the uncomfortable point: the vast, vast majority of us are normal and don't have a convenient excuse for our poor sleep habits.
>If you wake up having hit a snooze button that you didn't consciously push, is that your fault?
Absolutely. 1000%. Move your alarm. Hide it. Make it not turn off until you do math problems. Have a friend call you. Set your computer to set off such an unholy alarm that your neighbors will hear. Buy one of those alarm helicopters that flies around the room until you catch it. Do what you have to do.
It is your responsibility and yours alone to wake up early enough to meet the obligations that you made for yourself.
Period.
For myself? Sure. But why should I feel beholden to other people's schedules like the article says?
All this author is saying is that if you CHOOSE to make commitments and then fail to honor them, you're not an awful person, but yes you should feel guilty for that. On that, I agree.
Note, I was in and out of specialist children's hospitals for a good year or two while doctors tried to diagnose the reason my brain works differently to theirs. I have a certain set of psychological challenges I have to overcome, but I don't sit around whining about it all day.
Even the original article didn't do that. The author lists several steps he took to improve his condition. He just wanted people to avoid useless guilt, he didn't give them a free pass.
She was so relieved simply to know that she didn’t have a problem; or more specifically, she was relieved to know that her problem was real. For she had gone all these years thinking that she was just lazy.
For all of those of you out there suffering under the weight of your inability to wake up early each morning, consider this one giant pardon.
the post comes off as one giant "it's ok to put your hand up and say 'I have a named medical condition so can I be excused from class'". That could just be my biased interpretation though as I've come across such a mindset before and tend to react very angrily to it. If that's not the message at all then consider my rant misplaced.
Possibly.. why are you in a coma?
Every generation thinks that. It's nothing new really.
Otherwise a good rant.
edit: credit also to Babbage and Lovelace (also English)
Not to invalid your point, just that its quibbles all the way down.
Turing is the Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, and Michael Jordan of computer science.
Plus, attacking other people as lazy doesn't mean you yourself have to put in the work to familiarize yourself with history before making historical claims. Going to the library is too hard for my generation.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/242769.php
I often wonder if similar treatment could improve empathy across the board.
Whoa, melatonin makes you dream? Sounds interesting. I can count on one hand the number of dreams I'm aware of having over the past 10 years.
I mean, I hate mornings as much as the next person, and have slept through a decent number of events. Yet still, when I had kids and had to get up for a crying baby or to change a diaper, I Just Did It, and didn't feel the need to blog about whether I should feel "guilty" about it.
I mean, really: don't we have more important things to argue about? Isn't there a new Javascript rendering abstraction layer or something?
I've lost jobs over it, relationships, all sorts of fairly major personal issues.
My point is that there are solutions that enable people to fix this problem, if they are so inclined. This sort of excoriating article disregards the real pain people experience, and the other sort of article disregards the real issues that 'just never do anything in the morning and don't try to adapt' causes.
HN is actually quite good on technical issues. People disagree, but it's rarely completely idiotic. There is smart stuff, and information is exchanged, and the overall level of debate is good.
But on philosophical issues, it's frankly not very good. There is a lot of knee-jerk bigotry. I mean this post leads by calling people "sissies", a clearly homophobic term. It also has a complete disinterest in science, and is longer on trolling and provocation than reason or intelligence. It worked. Got to #1 on HN!
Simple sound-bites, strong opinions, and posts that I can only really describe as in the "lifehacking" genre on the one hand, or the "political/social provocation" genre on the other hand, are what's the worst about HN. These are usually embarrassing at best. And in the best case they get flagged off the front page. The moderators are also clearly worried, because provocative titles often get changed, which sometimes leads to the posts fizzling without being flagged. Reduces damage, at least.
Anyway, as you say, time for a break. I'm sick of Joe Conway and his ilk of arrogant, ignorant assholes. Before chiding other people for being lazy, maybe these ignorant fucks should get off their asses and visit a library. They aren't stupid, but they're ignorant. Science and intelligence is about more than blogging whatever comes to the top of your head after 10 minutes of thought. You need to read. You need to think a bit about whether the first reaction that comes to mind is correct: is this really the position you want to write a manifesto about? Do you have data to support your contention that an alleged condition is imagined and actually the people are just lazy losers, and "suck it up" is a good prescription? Or are you just expressing a reactionary, right-wing political view borne more out of politics and prejudice than rationality and evidence?
It was used when I was a kid too. But when I was a kid, people also used the words "Jewed" and "Gypped" to mean "got ripped off", and "gay" to mean "bad". In retrospect those those were all... not so good. And now I'm an adult who is capable of reading and gaining knowledge about such things.
If this post was written 40 years ago it would be directed at women telling them they actually have it pretty good. Hmm wait I actually saw that same thing just the other day.
These ignorant arrogant people need to figure out why they don't have even a smidgen of empathy and quit blaming us for being "bleeding hearts".
Says the poster who singularly fails to address any of the points made by the OP, choosing instead to engage in ad hominem attacks.
Stop posturing and heed your own advice.
If trying like hell not to have to wake up early in the morning makes someone a sissy, then I'm the king of sissies.
This reminds me of a quote from Crowfoot, once a chief of the Blackfoot tribe:
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
Life's short. Enjoy it. If that means not waking up at a certain time, then don't. But, also, don't complain when you have to deal with the consequences.
Wait, maybe I should make this reply a blog post instead.
Joe Conway, you said in your post that "every single one of your actions is controllable". If you truly believe this, you should demonstrate it by controlling your impulse to be an asshole.
If you can adjust to those things, you can adjust your "normal" sleep cycle and you don't have this rare condition.
The reason you have a hard time getting up "early" is that you go to sleep too late. Just go to sleep an hour earlier than "normal". Too hard? Impossible? If that's so, how do you do it every year when we go off DST?
That said, it's not about going to bed earlier, at least for me. You can't solve it that way. What you have to do is stay up later and later, and eventually loop over to a 'normal' time. This involves several days of non-traditional sleeping hours or extreme exhaustion.
For reference, according to http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/delayed-sleep-phas... these are the official criteria for diagnosing Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome:
1. Patient has chronic difficulty falling asleep at desired time to meet their daily schedules - work, school, etc. Typically patient reports inability to sleep before 2 to 6 am.
2. The patient reports having dealt with these symptoms for at least six months, mostly for multiple years.
3 When not required to maintain their schedule--i.e. weekends, holidays, etc.--patient sleeps without difficulty, and will awaken spontaneously after a sleep period of normal length.
And I welcome this change with open arms. Hard work in itself is not a goal and shouldn't be treated as such.
Nope! I regularly spring out of bed feeling wide awake, well rested and ready to start the day a good hour or two before I need to get up to get to work on time, and that time immediately after waking up in the morning is often my favorite part of the day.
Of course, the flipside of this is that I'm often ready to pass out by 9 PM.
No one likes waking up in the morning.
I for one actually do like waking up early in the morning and have been like that as long as I can remember. I also have some friends who think like this as well, so be careful when making generalizations :)
I don't feel guilty for over-sleeping. I've worked out a life for myself where people don't care that I sleep until 11:00. I simply don't schedule meetings or appointments for the morning, or if there's absolutely one that can't be avoided, I go to bed early and set an alarm clock to wake up for it.
It is not being a sissy to know your limitations and preferences and to work around them. If you make a commitment to another person, you should keep it. But nobody is forcing you to make that commitment in the first place. Is it really impossible to schedule that meeting in the afternoon, or to not have it at all?
It's not the OPs place to say what sort of sleep habits other people should or should not have. If he finds them annoying, fine: don't work with them.
The author's point is that many people with this "disorder" continue to make commitments they cannot keep. It is Jason Freedman who says "The one who can’t seem to consistently set the alarm clock for A.M. and not P.M. I know how it feels to be the undependable one."
If you are consciously aware of this, yet continue to make these commitments - then the author I believe argues you are a "lazy", "sissy."
When saying "If you make a commitment to another person, you should keep it." I see you as being in agreement with the post I just read.
If you recognize that this is a real problem, you can take steps to fix it. Things like shifting your schedule or regulating blue light. Not just "don't be lazy" or "get off Reddit", that sort of attitude doesn't help.
The original referenced material doesn't talk about making excuses. He talks about managing a real physical condition so that you don't miss meetings and don't have to make excuses. It's about understanding that having that condition doesn't make you lazy or a lesser person.
By being late, you're communicating that your job isn't the most important thing in your life. If that's true, we should be honest about it.
Every generation is full of the weak and the strong. We're all weak in some ways and strong in others. We've learned to subsidize one another.
I'm not sure the "get over it" solution is working. It's accepted that developers will work without wearing full suits. This isn't different, maybe allowances should be made for productivity's sake.
Missing appointments is a different thing, and is unacceptable. Is day to day flexibility really that big of a problem?
So you know what I did? I stopped trying to fix it. I realized that I might never be one of those people who get to work at 8am and I shifted my schedule. I am much happier now. This was the tone of the original article, and I take offense to this article telling me I am lazy.
The entire point is, for many people "quitting reddit" is not going to help. At all. And if you don't get it, then boo-hoo, stop reading things that make you write silly rants.
Don't eat a late dinner. Eat before 7 pm. Go to bed between 9.30 and 10.30 pm. If you want, use the time before second sleep[1] to catch up on reading. Get up when your alarm rings at 6 am. Every damn day.
These are all points you certainly can control yourself.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
It's biology. Giving it a moral weight is nonsense.
Not necessarily! In hotter parts of the world, they deliberately avoid conducting business during the middle part of the day. (That may come with earlier rising, offset by a siesta.)