My roommate and I have been having an argument on and off for several months now. It all started off as a part of a group complaint about one of America’s worst traditions: daylight savings time. I think everyone can agree at shifting the clocks twice a year so farmers can sleep in or whatever the real reason is serves no real purpose. Those guys can wake up whenever they need to, and it shouldn’t be our problem. We agreed on that much.
I then proceeded to lay out my reasoning for thinking that time zones themselves are unnecessary. I told them how I believed the planet should be on a universal clock. In my system, if it’s 12:37 in Shang Hai, it’s 12:37 in Chicago, Dublin, Australia, and everywhere else. He did not agree. As a matter of fact, he passionately disagreed.
I’m not the type of person who needs to be right. If he simply acknowledged my thoughts, and threw it a maybe, we would’ve moved on. It was his opinion that my proposal was not only ridiculous, but impossible that made me defend it so hard. It might not be the best invention since the wheel, or adult content on the internet, but conceptually it works.
He claims that it would be ridiculous to have midnight when it’s light out, or to wake up when it’s dark. I laughed at his rigid, narrow mindset. Midnight is a concept of our minds that we created. We could call midnight 8:56 am if it was convenient for our day. All that would change for us on a daily schedule, is the meaning we have associated with each time.
I get that this whole system might seem overly complicated, and straight up pointless. If you think that way, you are like my roommate. I implore people like you to imagine going on a cross country flight. You will have never switched timezones. You will have simply went about your day, and time won’t have changed. Your relationship with the sun will have, but that is all that our current perception of time is anyway. When you arrive at your destination, you would ask what the local midnight is, and you’d build your schedule around that.
As much as I’ve intentionally laid this out in a ridiculous manner to highlight the mundanity of the months long debate going in my house, I truly believe my argument. Honest to god, I think that we can and should get rid of time zones. People smarter than me could iron out the semantics of it. Either way, I think this would solve a lot of problems for the whole world.
Please drop your thoughts on this argument. Me and my roommate would love to hear an outside opinion on this.
