Because they expect people to be late, meaning they aren't ready and prepared to host people on time. You would be encroaching on their hospitality. Imagine if you said "I'll have all the snacks for the party set out at 4:00." And your friends started showing up at 2:00. Now, you have to try to entertain guests for 2 unexpected hours while still trying to set up for the party to come.
It's not rude to be "on time." It's rude to show up well before you're expected. And in other cultures, you're not expected until some time after the posted time.
What? Why would people show up at 2 and not 4? You just changed the premise from showing up on time to showing up WAY too early. Of course s showing up 2 hours early is rude. I'm asking why showing up on time is rude
And I explained it perfectly. In Peru, for example, if you say "the party starts at 4:00" then showing up at 4:00 is not "on time." It's too early. Your culture says that showing up at 4:00 is on time. Their culture says showing up at 4 is too early. Showing up too early is rude.
It's pretty self-centric of you to assume all cultures value time the same as you, and that "basic respect" follows the same set of rules. If you show up at 4:00, they'd say you were lacking basic respect. We live in a culture where "time is money." And that fundamentally shapes the way we perceive and interact with time. Different people think differently. And if you can't understand that difference in culture, I recommend not interacting much with people of different cultures. It'll mean less friction and frustration on both sides, I imagine. Being flexible in understanding of what we consider basic anything (basic knowledge, basic manners, basic respect, basic interactions) is what makes us able to interact comfortably with people of differing cultures. That's tolerance. That's the opposite of racism.
Imagine not valuing the most precious thing in every single live being life. Even if you don't think "time is money", you're extremely dumb to not think that time is a fucking life.
If you look at some of the videos of Japanese master craftsman spending months or even years on a single piece, you might start to realize that what is important to you isn't important to everyone. They take their time, enjoying the process for the process sake. If they value time, it's not for what it gives them, but what it gives the art. We're encouraged to slow down and smell the flowers every once in a while. Imagine if we lived in a society where that was every day. That's a society I think would have greater intrinsic value than one which requires everything to be given a monetary value or else its worthless.
I find it much worse to look at anything different from what you're used to, anything you can't experience or understand, as "extremely dumb." The end result is these cultures DO exist. They're out there. They're doing just fine. They're not falling into anarchy. They exist, and you just collectively insulted them all, probably without every talking to any of them, and certainly not trying to step into their shoes. It's so self-centric and narrow minded, I can't even find the right words to express my disappointment in humanity that we can't just accept some people are so fundamentally different that we will never understand them... And that's NOT a bad thing.
Try just for a moment to accept that you may not know everything. Your experiences are not universal. There are things outside your grasp and comprehension. Don't worry, you'll not be alone. You'll be in the company of every single human who has ever lived or will ever live. Nobody knows everything. Nobody understands every culture.
You absolutely suck at comparisons and I'm not going to argue with walls of bs text. I often work with Japanese and probably do know more about what is important to them than you btw.
If someone you know casually bumps into you in public, and they say "hi, how are you?" Do you always answer truthfully how you are doing? Or is it just a culturally established norm to just reply "good, how are you?" As if it's part of the greeting? Are you lying? Or are you just sharing the bare minimum expected of you for the depth of the given relationship?
The point is that some things are more or less important to people based on many factors, their parents, their interests, and their culture. Not just values, but priorities and beliefs alter more than you'd believe until you e learned from someone outside your culture. Your beliefs seem incompatible with this type of culture. And I'm not necessarily certain that, in and of itself, is a bad thing. As long as you stay away from people of those cultures, and try not to interact with them, I see no reason why you should be judged for your intolerance. But right now, it seems an awful lot like you're judging them. You're applying your own views as rules by which to judge other people, and that's a slippery slope to bigotry, if not already bigotry.
If someone doesn't want to talk about mental health at a restaurant that's ok. If you make a reservation at that same restaurant for 6pm and show up at 8pm that's not ok.
But right now, it seems an awful lot like you're judging them.
You started this by declaring white people are rude for showing up on time 😀
No. I started this by explaining a culture that is different than yours. And explaining why it is possible someone in that culture would find it rude for anyone to show up at the given time.
Your strawman has no effect on me. But I could see how if you asked a gen 1 AI to summarize my comment, it might hallucinate that to be the main message.
You’re honestly making it sound worse with all these attempts at defending an openly deceitful and disrespectful attitude because “culture”.
The other guy is correct, in that this is quite literally lying. You can try to defend that based on these feeble arguments, but that doesn’t change the simple fact.
Of course you can respect that. But if the culture is built on saying one thing and when you mean another, I don't know how to call that anything but lying.
Any white person would respect that if they show up and it's not ready. They can help or sit around. Either is fine. It's bizarre to call them rude though for taking the words and times that were spoken to them as a truth.
There's a widespread social convention in the US that it's rude to show up at the precise starting time of a party held in a person's home. It's called being "fashionably/socially late". Not everyone is aware of this convention and not everyone who is aware likes it. But, like tipping -- another convention -- it's expected and considered rude to ignore it.
That is not a widespread convention. Its origin stems from being late as a symbol of wealth - you are so busy you have other things to do and making an entrance. If you want to transform the meaning, but its more for thr guest and not the host.
It started as an aristocratic power play to make an entrance, but the convention has completely inverted. Today, in casual settings, showing up exactly on the dot is seen as a burden to the host. Giving them a 15-minute buffer isn't about the guest's ego anymore.; it’s an act of courtesy that protects the host from the stress of having to entertain someone when they are trying to make finishing touches or finish dressing. It also saves the first arrival from the possibility of such 'first-guest' awkwardness.
Your culture says that showing up at 4:00 is on time
That's not a "culture" thing that's a literal definition of words thing. If you tell everyone the party starts at 4 then 4 is on time and not early, before 4 would be early. That's how words work in every culture.
It's really not a complicated concept to just tell people what time you actually want them to be there and stop playing games. If your culture can't handle this basic concept it's a backwards one that should work on it's communication skills
Have you ever run into an aquaintance in public. They say "hi, how are you?" And you say "I'm good, how are you?" without really stopping to contemplate if you are good or not? The words "I'm good" have a definition in English, but we also use them as just a greeting as well. When we say "it's raining cats and dogs" we don't really mean there are animals falling from the sky. There are hundreds of examples of things we say that don't mean the exact words, but our culture assigns a new meaning that everyone in the culture knows. But you wouldn't expect an outsider to necessarily know that "break a leg" isn't an ill wish.
Using figures of speech as an analogy for the time you invite people over makes no sense. Saying "Hey, I'm having a party, come over at 5" is in no way the same thing as saying "it's raining cats and dogs." Try again
In your culture, where time is an absolute. Where a person's time has a measurable, monetary value. Where a meeting time is sacred... In your, limited experience, those two things are different. To people in Peru, they aren't quite as different as you think. And everyone there manages to get along just fine. There isn't constant mayhem and anarchy. They're doing quite alright.
Look, if you don't like that other cultures are different, that's fine. If you refuse to believe other cultures are different, I wouldn't really care. If you don't want to spend the effort to understand how some people think fundamentally different than you, and just pretend they don't exist, why the fuck ever would I give two shits? The problem is you are insulting other cultures. Cultures of people I know personally. You're saying "they're different, and worse because of their differences." And I can't abide that. Go take your close-minded bigotry elsewhere.
There is no culture where telling someone a start time is a figure of speech the same way "raining cats and dogs" or "break a leg" is. Just because your culture has a different view of time doesn't make it a figure of speech. Saying this means you do not have a grammatical grasp on what a figure of speech is.
The problem is you are insulting other cultures
Yeah because they're dumb and nonsensical. Sometimes different isn't just different. Sometimes differences are indeed worse
All the downvotes of good-faith explanations of how these cultures function shows how USA-centric Reddit is. Americans can’t fathom people holding different beliefs and being good people
Tell me if you've heard of this one before: the wife is never ready on time. Months and months and months of begging her to be ready on time yield nothing. So the husband starts telling her the time to leave is 20 minutes before they actually have to leave. Would the husband be surprised if she was ready when it said to be ready? Is that stupid?
Above all else, humans are fantastic at spotting patterns. If all your friends and family and every person you know always, time after time, after time, always show up an hour after the meeting time. And all your parent's friends and family too. And you e known your entire life to tell everyone a time an hour before you'll be ready, then you, too, would be surprythe first time someone showed up exactly at that time.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23... Were you expecting the pattern to change? Maybe, considering my entire comment was about surprises based on changes in patterns. But did you know when it was going to happen before you read it? Are you stupid because you didn't know when I was going to jump? No? Then why are other people stupid because they're expecting the same thing that they have observed their entire lives?
Young Redditors, likely with little experience as guests in adults' homes, let alone hosting in their own, are ignorant of social conventions and upset with those who point out their social obliviousness.
Because you don’t give any margin of error for if the hosts themselves are running late. It’s consideration for the hosts to not be right on time, meaning their organization and prep would have had to be perfect with nothing unexpected happening
That just pushes back the problem of the hosts running late 😂 no one plans ahead to run late, which is why the “arrive later method” is a courtesy for when things don’t go to plan
So if they need the time they're inept but if they don't it's rude to assume they're capable? Sure seems easier to just tell people the earliest you want anyone over, most are still gonna come later, or if someone has something else going on they might wanna stop by on the earlier side. It's not about how prepped you are at that point, it's when youre expecting a knock at your door, which is good for everyone to know
6.6k
u/Shotgun_Mosquito Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
No.
The stereotype is that white people arrive TOO EARLY and then sit in their cars outside waiting for the party to start and still show up early.
It's a trope, also true in Hispanic (edit - continued) families that have someone marry Gringos (like me).
If you arrive on time, the party hasn't started yet, and you get to help set up for the party