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.
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.
You can see my other post. I am also quite short. However I do not have this experience you are conveying here. I think it is a matter of attitude, more than height. Of course being a quiet guy who is 190cm would be better than being a quiet guy who is 165cm.
I'm ideally a medium tall (MT) but that size is a unicorn (doesn't exist). LT sometimes doesn't look too baggy but they're so rare I don't even bother searching for them in most clothes stores.
When a store has a big and tall section it's literally big AND tall, not normal and tall. If you are 2m (6'7") tall you better weigh 300lbs if you want a shirt that fits.
I like TallSlim Tees [0] – pricey for what they are, quality-wise, but for me it's worth it to get a good fit for once. I have a similar build to GP (191cm, ~77kg) and wear a size medium in these. Very nice not needing to clad myself in a billowing sail just so my shirt can reach past my belt
Is it such a surprise that customization is required to accommodate three standard deviations? People of that height aren't comfortable in every automobile, either.
If you're really fishing for tall sympathy on this thread, of all possible threads, you might want to avoid the word "normal"...
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).
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/