We all have that person. The friend who’s “five minutes away” for half an hour. The coworker who slides in after meetings start and acts surprised every time. After a while, lateness stops feeling accidental, and it’s just accepted as part of their personality.
Lately, the explanation floating around is time blindness. The term has made its way from clinical research to TikTok captions, raising a fair question. Is chronic lateness a neurological issue, or a manners problem dressed up as one?
Time blindness refers to difficulty sensing the passage of time or estimating how long tasks take. It’s closely tied to executive function in the frontal lobes of the brain and is commonly associated with ADHD. As Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist in Florida, told the Associated Press, “Anyone can have issues with running late, just with ADHD, there’s functional impairment. It impacts family life and social life. It impacts work, money management, all areas of life.”
For Alice Lovatt, a musician and group-home worker in Liverpool, that impairment showed up early. “I just don’t seem to have that clock that ticks by in my head,” she told the AP. Lovatt wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until her early 20s. Before that, she internalized her lateness as a personal failure.
The concept itself isn’t new. Russell Barkley, a retired clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Massachusetts, linked ADHD with time impairment decades ago, calling it “temporal myopia.” What’s new is how broadly the label now gets applied.
That’s where frustration creeps in. Not everyone who runs late has ADHD. Jeffrey Meltzer, a therapist in Florida, encourages people to look at what’s underneath the behavior. Some people avoid arriving early because they dread awkward small talk. Others feel over-scheduled and steal time back where they can. Meltzer compares that impulse to “revenge bedtime procrastination,” the habit of staying up late to reclaim a sense of control.
Then there’s the harder category to talk about. Entitlement. Meltzer told the AP that when lateness comes with a pattern of special treatment elsewhere, it may not be neurological. “Maybe they’re 20, 30 minutes late, and it’s like, ‘Oh, look who is here,’” he said. “So it’s a way to kind of get attention.”
Even when time blindness is real, it doesn’t erase responsibility. Sarkis, who also has ADHD, is clear about that. Accommodations help, but they don’t cancel the impact on other people’s time.
The solutions tend to be practical rather than philosophical. External timers. Checklists. Overestimating how long things take. Lovatt now breaks her mornings into minute-by-minute steps. “It doesn’t work, like, 100 percent of the time,” she told the AP. “But generally, I am a lot more reliable now.”
The uncomfortable truth is that lateness can come from different places and feel the same on the receiving end. Understanding the cause can build empathy. It doesn’t require unlimited patience.
The post Maybe Your Chronically Late Friend Isn’t Rude, They Just Have Time Blindness appeared first on VICE.
