Many years ago, my brother, my father and I were at the tail end of a wonderful vacation in an island paradise. All that remained was our journey home, which would begin at a very small airport that was a 10-minute drive down the road.

My father is the kind of person who likes to arrive at the airport a full two hours before takeoff, three hours if it’s an international flight. My brother and I are ... not that kind of person. We knew perfectly well that for this kind of flight we could have arrived at the airport 30 minutes before takeoff and would have made the flight with ease.

As the time to depart neared, my brother and I did one of the meanest things we’ve ever done to my dad. Even as he started packing and acting as though it was time to leave — two hours before our departure time, mind you — my brother and I just kept reading, acting completely relaxed. We had decided to conduct an experiment, to see how long our father could last before demanding that we depart for the airport.

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The next hour was sheer agony for my father. He knew, in his rational mind, that it would take no time at all to get to the airport, that this was a small puddle-jumper of a plane, and that if we got there too early we would just be sitting around there rather than in our swanky hotel room. Nonetheless, he fidgeted more and more and two hours became 90 minutes before departure, and then 75. Finally, at the one-hour mark, he demanded that we go to the airport. Which we did, and then sat around for another fifty minutes waiting to board the flight.

This memory of father abuse came back to me as I read the Atlantic’s Amanda Mull on the different kinds of airport people:

Because I’m a compulsively early person, I’ve always assumed the other people trucking through the airport were doing their best to be on time, even if their best was different from my own (superior) best. Why would anyone look at an experience as expensive and anxiety-inducing as flying and want to make it a little bit riskier?

Some chronically late people do, of course, intend to be on time. But a smaller group of frequent fliers heads into air travel with lateness as the goal, relishing the thrill of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. “I just really live for the feeling of literally running through the airport barefoot because you didn’t have time to put your shoes on after security, and your laptop is in your hand because you didn’t have time to put it back,” says my colleague Ellen Cushing, a senior editor at The Atlantic. ...

Jonny Gerkin, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina, told me that both airport arrival styles are likely just different ways of approaching the same emotional problem: the extreme anxiety of air travel. “One person is hyper-efficient and overprepared, and another is someone who doesn’t manage their anxiety that way,” Gerkin said. It’s not that late people don’t find the airport as stressful as early people do, in other words, but that their coping mechanisms indicate a fundamentally different approach to the negative parts of life.

You should read the whole thing, which is interesting but incomplete. As someone who flies a fair amount, I have some additional thoughts.

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First, it is possible for one’s preferences to change over time. When I was in my 20s I was definitely in the “get to the airport as late as humanly possible” camp. I can recall several times when I sprinted through the terminal, making it to my gate just before the door closed. Then I actually missed a flight, which caused all kinds of bad complications. That was when I discovered that the anxiety of missing a flight far outweighed whatever other anxieties I had about flying.

Second, Mull’s article failed to consider the Very Important Question of checking one’s bag. I hate to check my bag, because that costs me time (waiting for it to arrive in baggage claim), money (baggage fees) and anxiety (what if the airline loses my bag?!). As New York’s Josh Barro observed last month, changes to airline economics mean that “passengers try to bring more luggage on board planes than can actually fit in the overhead bins and underneath seats, which means late-boarding passengers are at risk of having their bags gate-checked, thus imposing the dreaded wait at the baggage claim to retrieve a bag.” To ensure I can put my bag in an overhead bin, I need to be at the gate well before the door closes — I need to be there early enough to board the plane as soon as my status allows it.

Third, and most importantly, it does not matter what kind of airport person you were when you were single and childless, because everything changes when you travel with family. Scrambling to make a flight with small children is piling mountains of stress upon even more mountains of stress. Trying to get to the airport with multiple generations of extended family is a logistical puzzle that rivals D-Day. Traveling with family requires late-arrival thrill-seekers to change their lifestyle; having children tends to have that effect.

Fourth, it is much more enjoyable to write about this than the decay of the liberal international order. I’ll get back to that topic next week.

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