Comments:"You should feel guilty for over-sleeping; or, my generation is full of sissies."
I read this post on Hacker News today and I believe I’ve hit a breaking point on my opinion of my generation:
You all are lazy, crybaby complainers and I’m sick of listening to your excuses.
If you haven’t read the article above, I’ll summarize it for you: the author says he used to run late for meetings in the morning because he suffers from “Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome”. He wants you to know that you shouldn’t feel guilty if you can’t get out of the bed in the morning to make a meeting, because you are the victim here. You were born with a disease. It’s not your fault.
Here is the deal: if you lack the decency to honor your responsibilities simply because you can’t summon the discipline to wake yourself up in the morning, you should feel guilty. If you think it is okay to make making members of your team – who work hard to show up on time – wait for you, consider this: your team members have a home and family life. They intentionally sacrifice a few minutes of time they actually enjoy with their family the night before the meeting so that the can get the required sleep to show up on time. When you run 10 minutes late, it moves their day back 10 minutes. That 10 minutes comes out of the time with their family.
You should feel 100% guilty for that. It’s your fault and your fault alone. Just because someone has conjured up a “label” for the way your brain works doesn’t give you a free pass to break your word.
No one likes waking up in the morning. It doesn’t make you special or unique, it means you lack the discipline to follow through with what you said you would do. Everyone else naturally wakes up earlier than you do? Boo-hoo, get off Reddit and go to bed earlier.
Everyone has their own challenges that are unique to them. Everyone gets their sleep schedule messed up sometimes. Everyone has gone through a break up. Everyone has lost someone in their lives. We have all had to struggle in some way against the hand we were dealt. Just today, it was reported that three kidnapped girls fought for 10 years to finally escape – and you can’t wake up 10 minutes earlier? What would they give for just 10 of your wasted minutes?
We used to value hard work. It was the cornerstone of our society. We invented computing, the telephone, the automobile and modern medicine. We invaded Normandy. We traveled to the moon. We dug our way out of every challenge that has come before us to get where we are now. Now we’re selling sepia filters for a billion dollars and complaining that we can’t pay our student loans back.
Gain some perspective. Every single one of your actions is controllable. Every outcome is influenceable. Refuse that last-place-participation medal that people want to give you and tell them, “You know what, I don’t deserve it, I didn’t earn a medal today.” Go back and put in the work. Earning your life is supposed to be difficult.