Anyone can be late a handful of times, but to be the person who is always late—that’s an art, a frustrating art. Or, a side effect of your personality, scientists have found.

So what is it that causes some people to constantly miss trains, make it to the wedding just after the bride’s shown up and regularly annoy their friends? And why is it so hard for us to fix it? “There are allsorts of punishments for being late, but we are still late even when those punishments and consequences exist.” said Justin Kruger, a social psychologist at New York University.

One of the commonest reasons why people are frequently late is that-they fail to accurately judge how long a task will take—something known as the planning fallacy. Research has shown that people on average underestimate the tune to complete a task by a significant 40 percent.

Besides, forever-late-comers are more likely to be multitaskers. A 2023 study found that out of 181subway operators in New York City, those who preferred multitasking were more often late for their job. This is because multitasking makes it harder to have the awareness of what you’re doing. It’s also discovered there is a personality type that’s more likely to be late. While highly nervous, achievement-oriented Type A individuals arc more possible to be punctual, Type B individuals, however, who are calmer and more relaxed, have a higher chance to be late.

Admittedly, knowing all of this doesn’t necessarily help fix the problem. But scientists are starting to work on strategies that can slowly improve our punctuality. For people who constantly underestimate tasks, breaking down an activity into detailed steps can help people estimate how long something will take more accurately. As for your personality type, unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to change that. But accepting that you need to struggle for it may just help. Acceptance, after all, is the first step to change.

As the UK personal debt breaks the one trillion pound mark, four people talked to Channel 9 News Online about debt.

I see the government says it wants to encourage small businesses. What a joke! The whole financial system is in favour of the big boys and they always just want to protect their interests. My gardening business had cash-flow problems last year, which I meant I needed a temporary loan to pay my staff. My bank just refused point blank to extend my credit. My business ended up going to the wall. Now I open the paper today and I see some cable company is negotiating with the banks to restructure £12 billion of debt. There’s no justice.

My parents had problems with debt, which meant I couldn’t get a credit card before I left home and I believe I wouldn’t get one when I did leave home. But then you get out into the big bad world and you’re just surrounded by temptation. A few years ago, I was persuaded to celebrate New Year in Egypt. I took out a loan to pay for the holiday and cover my expenses and then I got a credit ‘just for emergencies’. The next thing I knew I’d spent £3,000 on the card. I tried to deal with the debt by transferring the money onto another credit card, but by then I’d got into the habit of spending and I ran up a debt on that card too. Over the next two or three years, things just got completely out of hand, and now I’m £38,000 in debt.

All that ‘never a borrower nor a lender be’ stuff is all just rubbish, if you ask me. There isn’t a successful businessman in the world who hasn’t had to borrow money to either get started or to expand. If you worry about what you owe, if you let it play on your mind, you’ll never take the risks you need to take in order to be successful.

We borrowed a few thousand pounds off my parents-in-law to buy our house and now I just wish we hadn’t. It’s just something they constantly hold over us and it’s caused a lot of problems --- like last year when we said we weren’t going to stay at Christmas. My mother-in-law got all upset saying ‘You’re so ungrateful. All the things we’ve done for you and you just throw it back in our faces.’

Since Zhao Hongshan’s dermal filler injection (皮肤填充注射) four years ago—he has spent around 80,000 yuan on his face. “Getting plastic surgeries is just as normal as body building. Both make men more handsome and confident,” says the 33-year-old, who owns a gym in Beijing.

Zhao is among a growing number of Chinese men using plastic surgeries to change their physical appearance to increase their self-confidence. In 2021, the market for beauty medicine in China was worth more than 495 billion yuan, with males accounting for around 15 percent of customers, according to a report by plastic surgery social networking app Gengmei.

There is a rising trend of young men turning to plastic surgeries; most male customers are in their teens or 20s. “Some men just want to please themselves, while others hope to improve their possibility in job hunting or dating,” says Wang Jun, vice-president of marketing for Gengmei. “Men are under the same social pressures as women and their confidence and competitiveness would be more or less weakened by facial and body weaknesses.”

However, experts point out the risks of plastic surgeries. Fan Jufeng, director of the Plastic Surgery Department at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, does not encourage people, no matter men or women, to “blindly” go under the knife.

According to the National Health Commission, a total of 2,772 cases related to illegal (非法的) plastic surgeries were handled by China's health departments during a year long attack that started in May 2017.

Fan also warned the public of the negative influences of live streaming celebrities (流量明星) who promote the misunderstanding that being pretty goes above all else. “Whether to have plastic surgeries is a personal choice, but people should not be addicted (上瘾) to it,” Fan says. “Think twice on it. After all, a rich and beautiful inside world is far more important than a pretty face.”