I did industrial tech support in an automobile assembly plant. I would get calls to fix something, and I would tell them why it was someone else's responsibility, or I would try to explain something.

When I went out to plant floor, it was like my perceived IQ went up by 20 points. Suddenly the things I said made sense. I think most of this effect can be attributed to the fact that I cared enough to show up, and that it's easier to communicate in person. That's most of it, but I'm also a large-ish white male (6 feet tall, 250 pounds at that time) and that physical presence does seem to have an effect on some people.

---

It's easy to think that I'm making a moral statement one way or another by what I've said here, but you don't have to think that.

Straight out of GATTACA.

I cringed pretty hard when the image at the top loaded; was not expecting this kind of story, was expecting a missive on the song from the 90s.

Also, this story reminds me of a passage, among many, from the Deus Ex timeline wiki (https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline):

"Antoine Thisdale, an un-augmented oil rig worker sues for the right to have both of his fully functional natural arms amputated and replaced with cybernetic arms in an effort to compete with mechanically augmented workers in his profession. The Supreme Court rules in his favor, clearing the way for elective augmentation."

I am myself quite short (168cm). Growing up I had no insecurities about it, because I only started becoming short after puberty. Anyway, there was a period between ages 21 and 25 when I was obsessed about my height. Natural selection is pretty cruel. If you have good looks do not take them for granted. Now I care less about my height and more about my lack of hair.

It is really not healthy to obsess over this stuff. As I said, natural selection is pretty cruel in general, but it is also stochastic in nature. Being short, or bald, is not a death sentence, although it does make things harder.

There's one thing I have to say though. If you're successful and you still need to go to such lengths to attract women, you have yourself to blame and not your height.

When i was in elementary school, a classmate had something wrong with the growth plates in his femur, and the solution at the time was to basically do this surgery but at 2mm a week. He spent all of third grade with pins in his left leg and a permanently semi-healing femur that would get cracked open a bit further and a bit further...

he missed a LOT of school, because he basically couldn't function for 48 hours after the next increment was done.

The alternative was that his left leg would be 8" shorter than his right, so it was probably the right thing to do, but good lord it's not without cost.

As a well below average height guy who had knee surgery following an ACL tear: no freaking way I would even undergo surgery that wasn't absolutely necessary. Your bones may heal, but what about your muscles and the nerves they touch? Being healthy is way more important than looking good. I have (small) problems even from a routine intervention, I don't even want to know what these experiments yield.

And as insensitive as this might sound: get over your god damn insecurities. All the statistics in the world of how much more money tall guys make can't account for individuals, and we all know plenty of short rich business owners and poor big guys working terrible construction jobs or worse. The only real limitation in being short is dating tall women. But guess what, there's plenty things limiting your dating pool: baldness, being fat, facial features, age, social and financial status, etc. Nobody has it all and you will never finish if you go the rabbit whole. You can only end up like those women butchered by too much cosmetic surgery.

At 5'9 Im comfortable with my average height. Sure, had I been taller Id probably be perceived differently but these are things that cannot be changed (till now). Since I'm comfortable with my height I rarely think about this but I'm sure shorter guys may have it more on their mind than I do. Im genuinely curious though, with extending the length of the femur, wouldn't that make the body change proportions? Aren't taller folks consisting of larger/longer bones overall? How would that affect center of mass and balance?

I found that confidence can overcome a few inches in height and good communication skills can overcome the advantage taller people have, well, except for dating stuff...

I am 6'4".

Flying sucks.

Can't fit in a Miata and sports cars suck in general.

Showers in hotels suck.

Buying T-shirts is annoying.

I did have a nice dating life....but I missed out a ton because I was a quite oblivious lol...now I'm married and it doesn't really matter.

> According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases). I’m five six on a good day, and I’ve found that being short is great for flying economy class—and not much else.

Unbelievable :(

They could give teens growth hormone instead. I guess now that late adolescent gender transitions are becoming accepted, and since they already give growth hormone to little people, that's the next step.

Tall people die younger, have more joint and back pain, and have trouble finding shirts that fit.

See a shirt in a store? On me a L is a belly shirt and an XL is a baggy belly shirt.

I’m tall and wish I was average and I’m not even “super tall” just 76”/193cm. I straight up feel sorry for people taller than I. They end up on crutches before dying in their 60s.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1600586/

After my divorce, I dove into the hetero online dating community and discovered that many men lie about their height in their online profile. This is more common among men because many women do in fact want a taller man. Similarly, men and women both often lie about their age in order to help their profile sneak around age filters used by others.

But the lying about height is pathetic and always backfires, often spectacularly, because the women can tell immediately when the guy shows up three or four inches shorter. So at that stage the problem is lying, not height, and it makes for a very awkward date if the date even continues.

Things can always be looked the other way. Being short is an opportunity to play the game in hard mode, showing everyone that you've got skills. Sometimes I wish I was born black for that reason. Well, at least I'm short, happily married, and working on my path to meaningful accomplishments in my career :)

I am 6’2" and wish I was just a little bit shorter. The standard heights and sizes of everything from toilets to countertops to airplane seats simply are not designed for people over 6'.

I'm 6'4 and I wish I were 5'9.. I would fit on airplanes, busses, and even cars better. I could find shoes in my size that did not look as though they were government-issue. Proper fitting slacks..

"Be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone." -Mary Schmich

The kind of article were I had to check whether it was published on April 1.

Fascinating and somewhat shocking phenomenon. I was under impression that length would be the only aspect of humans that can’t be altered - turns out that was wrong.

I'm trying to be less judgmental, but John Lovedale is pushing me to the limit.

I am definitely going to try this! I could go from 5'11" to 6'4"!! That's how you go from middle management to VP!

> The effect is like a Grand Theft Auto extra who’s just been sniped in the butt.

An example video would help a lot.

I wish I was a little bit more able to comfortably sit on an average office chair.

I recommend the Haworth Very for taller folks. At the max height my femurs actually sit slightly above the horizontal plane containing my knees so I don’t feel boxed in.

wow

"I wish was a baller, I wish I had a girl, if I did I would call her".

Sorry first thing that came into mind when reading the title.

This cosmetic surgeon needs a refresher course on the Hippocratic oath.

> Natural selection is pretty cruel.

Is it? I think this is just the fallacious conclusion that results from a lack of humility and from a sense of entitlement. If you believe you're entitled to X, but you don't have what it takes for X, then you set yourself up for self-pity, envy, and grievance as if you've been wronged somehow by not getting what you (falsely) believe you are entitled to. But neither our qualities nor what those qualities can bring us are things we are owed. The solution is to recognize the truth about ourselves, here the immutable truth, and play with those cards instead of wishing we were someone else or had different cards, or hating those with better cards. The latter is a waste of time and ultimately self-destructive.

There is also a kind of dualism at work here. We see ourselves as somehow separate from our qualities. But we are those qualities! They are part of who and what we are. You could not have been otherwise without being someone else.

Egocentrism is a recipe for misery and no amount of manipulation or make believe will ever address the underlying mental and spiritual problem. It's much healthier to accept what you are and be grateful and work with what you have. Occupy your niche. If you're a tortoise, be a tortoise instead of fantasizing about being a cheetah.

Furthermore, surgery like this is essentially a form of lying. You are falsely advertising about your qualities. Whatever benefits you receive because of the mere appearance of having such qualities instead of the genuine thing is a species of fraud. Anything you receive through fraud will taste like ash in your mouth in the end.

And these traits won't be communicated to your children. In this way, you subvert natural selection.

Note also the incoherence. If the trait matters, then your deception is made worse. If the trait doesn't matter, yet people seem to value it anyway (a common form of denial among the have-nots), then why cater to those with a bad sense of value? Any appreciation you receive is fake anyway.

If you allow me to assume you are male, my quickmafs thinks you're taller than 4/5 women, as opposed to the median male who is taller than 19/20 of women.

Do other women want men taller than they are, or do they want men taller than other men? I don't understand the mechanism myself.

> you still need to go to such lengths

Regarding dating. If your goal is to find a great life partner and have a wonderful family, I find being short to actually be a benefit. Garbage women will self-select themselves out of your potential dating pool.

> a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases

Isn't that entirely to be expected just because men are on average taller than women? As a very quick 'n dirty numerical check, if you pick pairs of numbers from two normal distributions with means that are 2 standard deviations apart, only in 7.8% of the cases will the number from the distribution with the lowest mean be larger than that from the other distribution. In real life male and female heights aren't exactly normally distributed with the same standard deviation and just a differing mean, but is the true expected number of such pairs really much higher than 7.5%, that the result is significant?

>Short guys aren’t so much discriminated against as they are precluded from stuff: like dating certain taller people, or making your frosh-soph basketball team.

Another one in the hall of "writers who don't read their own articles," this was the sentence preceding the one about the wage gap.

> (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases)

Don't men also tend to prefer women who are shorter than them? I know I do personally (though my first two girlfriends were taller than me, go figure.)

But they have less cells that could become cancerous?

Could be a good investment if you do it while you're young

Learn to play guitar! Ideally singing while strumming.

If you think it's unfair to make $500 per inch less for the same work, try making 12.5% less, per breast.

Until we solve the inter gender pay gap, I'm not really interest in the intra gender height gap.

I'm very much below the national average height for my gender. After a while you'd start hoping that conversations occur at your eye level instead of flying over your head. Practically everyone I know from the same gender and half the other gender are taller than me. It's difficult to quantify the psychological impact of always having to metaphorically wave your hand in the air to get attention. Or when you invite friends over and every time you open the door, you find their eyes looking over your head before looking down seemingly to say "oh there you are". In the article, one of the patients at 5' 5" talked about being ignored by the bartender because a taller customer talked over him. That is something I actually experience fairly frequently.

WFH has been wonderful for this reason, everyone is a half body stump on camera.

I don't think the people in the article are aiming to be super tall. Just tall enough to match their peers. Arguably super tall people (YMMV since everyone is tall to me) and short people both want the same thing, to be average.

With all that being said, I don't find the tradeoff of cost, lost time, immobility, and pain to be worth that marginally extra social respect. And to be honest, it's just a mild annoyance.

> See a shirt in a store? On me a L is a belly shirt and an XL is a baggy belly shirt.

Seriously, as another skinny-ish tall person, I wish "L-Slim" was a thing. That would be so nice. I'm tired of wearing shirts that are way too wide.

I feel your pain. My son has had a >20" neck since he was mid-teens, on an otherwise typical big-guy build (6'3", was 240lbs in high school, now a good bit more). Custom dress shirts required, not even stuff from the B&T shops fit.

Yep, no one's ever happy :P. I wish I was a little shorter, plane and bus rides are a literal pain and I don't see any real benefit of being 1.90m when 1.80 - 1.85m would be enough.

That said I'm perfectly ok and wouldn't get surgery even if it was a routine thing, but I don't see any real benefit and only a few annoyances. (Buying clothes or bikes, not all chairs are comfy to sit on, etc).