Time zones can be very complicated. There are so many oddities throughout the world.
Whether it be a small Pacific-island nation that uses a time zone of UTC+14 even though
the logical limit is +12; a certain Asian nation that spans a potential five time zones,
yet choses to only use one; or the various countries (or regions within countries) that
refuse to use a time zone to the nearest hour. Looking at a time zone map of the world really
shows just how messed up things really are.
Time zones are actually a fairly recent thing, and were only made necessary with the advancement
of technology - specifically, the railroads. Previously, each individual town and city
had its own local time based on the sun, but the need to coordinate with other locations
made time zones a necessity.
Of course, advancements in technology have not only continued, but accelerated, since
the end of the 19th century. And with the ever-connected world that we live in in the
21st century, the age of the internet, some have come to question the usefulness of time
zones. Do we even need time zones? Couldn’t the whole world just live on one, universal
time zone? It would be the same time for everyone, all the the time, everywhere.
It may sound like a radical concept, but it is something that several people have made
an interesting case for, especially within the last 5 or years or so.
Now, first and foremost, it’s important to note that nobody is suggesting that certain
people flip their lives entirely, sleeping during the day and working at night, while
the lucky ones in other parts of the world get to stick to the normal day/night cycle.
Instead, society would continue to base its sleeping patterns around the sun of their
location, and merely shift the time to sync up with the rest of the planet. So people
in Australia might end up waking up at... 8pm, instead of 7am.
Sure, it would be weird at first, but people would get used to it.
Afterall, the numbers are fairly arbitrary anyway, right?
Getting up at 6pm may sound weird... but why? It doesn’thave to be.
So what would be the potential societal benefits to adopting such a system? Well, the superficial
advantages of this kind of setup are obvious, for starters, no more needing to coordinate
time zones every time you travel or speak with people in a different time zone. An 8
o'clock phone call in New York would also be an 8 o'clock phone call in Vienna.
The big benefit of abolishing time zones would be flexibility. Businesses and individuals
could have more freedom to plan their days. In a world where the traditional 9-5 is becoming
less and less common, a single time zone for everyone could facilitate the move towards
a more suitable working schedule for many people. This would also have the added societal
benefit of less traffic. With staggered start times, ranging across several hours, rush
hour in the morning would be less stressful and chaotic, with fewer people all trying
to get to work at the exact same time.
This would also allow many workers to access services that they otherwise would not be
able to with the current system - like going to the bank, for example. Typically, banks
are only open during business hours, so someone who works those same business hours would
be unable to find a suitable time to go into their local branch. Without a strict, inflexible
workday, a visit to the bank could become much easier to many people.
It should probably go without saying, that in a world without time zones, there would
also be no Daylight Saving Time either. However, workdays could be shifted at different times
during the year to better suit the seasonal movement of the sun. This would effectively
function like DST, but without the awkwardness of having to lose an hour in spring and gain
an hour in autumn. Of course, some might argue that this might create all of the same problems
that DST does, but if the idea is to move away from the 9-5 workday, then this wouldn’t
be an issue. It could be at the discretion of the company, institution, or person to
decide what works best for them.
Another advantage of this increased flexibility is the fact that the idea of the 9-5 workday
isn’t even something that’s universal. So many different countries have different
workdays, and many people within those countries don’t even follow the cultural norms. Take
Spain, for example, and the “siesta”. While this may be something that is becoming
less common these days, it is still something to take into consideration. The country’s
‘normal’ hours for eating dinner also vary massively from most of the Western world.
In much of Europe and North America, eating dinner at 6 or 7pm may be perfectly normal,
but this would be considered incredibly early for a Spaniard, who might not have dinner
until 10 or even 11pm.
With all that being said, if two people working for the same company in different time zones
even both have a 9-5 workday, those 9-5s are going to be at different times anyway. Different
people and different companies have different needs and responsibilities, so having more
flexibility will have more of an upside than being completely in-sync with the local population.
Now, on other hand… there is obviously a very strong case that can be made against
the abolishment of time zones.
Time zones may be complicated, but many of the so-called ‘problems’ that a universal
time zone would ‘solve’, could in most cases be solved in other, far less drastic
ways, and in some cases may actually exacerbate the problems instead.
Let’s first start by looking at international calling. Without time zones, time is never
ambiguous, but how do we know at what time it would be appropriate to call another country?
What if I want to call my uncle in Australia? Should I call now, at 2pm? It’s the same
time everywhere, but then again, the sun just rose a couple of hours ago, so I don’t really know.
The numbers we use at the moment may seem arbitrary, but they’re actually not.
12 noon is roughly when the sun is at its highest point, and therefore the middle of the day.
Yes, this varies by region… quite a lot in some places, but at the very least it’s
a good rule of thumb. Moreover, this gives context to other times of the day.
2am? Most people are probably asleep. 1pm? Lunchtime. 8:30am? Rush hour -
might be a good idea to avoid the roads, if you can.
Imagine getting off a plane in a foreign country, it’s dark, okay, what time is it? 4pm. Well,
that’s not very helpful. Is the sun about to rise… or maybe it just set? Is it the
middle of the night or early evening? Time that is independent of the movement of the
sun of the current location loses all of its meaning. Further context will always be needed
to know what time of day it actually is.
Now, being aware of cultural differences is good in all aspects of life, and this goes for
time zones, too. However, in no society around the world is it normal to get up at 1pm, start
work at 2, come home at 10, and get to bed at 5am. Yes, there will always be shift-workers,
and people with irregular schedules, but society as a whole fits its days around the sun.
In this sense, the flexibility argument for getting rid of time zones has one big weakness.
It may be true that 9-5 is becoming less common, but it would be naive to think that’s it
not still important. It’s how businesses coordinate, and how parents can take their
kids to school in the morning. By getting rid of time zones, we’ll just have a new
“9-5” in many places - it doesn’t in itself create flexibility. So, for example
if the sun rose at 2pm and the banks opened at 4… wouldn’t other businesses just open
at 4 as well? The standard workday would just end up functioning as a de facto time zone
for the region, but with the added difficulty of having to work out how to fit your day
around it. It would also be confusing for people who are not locals of that area because
there would be no universal standard.
On the extreme end of possibilities, you might end up with a worldwide version of the
situation that they currently have in western China. While the government in Beijing has
mandated their local time to be the one official time zone for the entire country, large parts
of the western portion of the country now use an unofficial time zone so that their
days are more in sync with the sun. It’s not inconceivable that different regions of
the world would just adopt their own local unofficial time zones if we got rid of the
official ones.
Ultimately, the benefits of time actually having a relatable and universal context,
is far more important than having a universal time.
Besides, flexibility can be achieved without the need to ditch time zones. If a company
wants its employees to come in at 10 instead of 9, well they can do it. There’s nothing
stopping them.
Another problem that’s slightly less obvious, would be with days of the week, and words
like “today” and “tomorrow”. Assuming we used UTC, this problem would only exist
in parts of the world far away from the prime meridian, but it would be a big one.
With current methods, a solar day and a calendar day are more or less in sync, regardless of
location. At 12am the day changes from Monday to Tuesday, and this is, by definition, the
middle of the night.
Now, imagine a country like New Zealand, which has its time zones completely flipped. Suddenly,
“today” and “tomorrow” lose a lot of their meaning. Sleeping would be common
around the middle of the calendar day, and Monday would pass into Tuesday in the middle
of the workday. If you arrive at work at 9pm and your boss asks for a report “by tomorrow”...
does he mean at like.. 1am? Or does he mean 9pm the next day, the start of the next workday?
Days of the week would completely lose all meaning. Workdays would be Monday/Tuesday
to Friday/Saturday, with Saturday/Sunday and Sunday/Monday being the weekend. Aside from
the obvious day-to-day confusion this would cause, there’s also the added confusion
of holidays, or religious days. And when would new year be celebrated? The middle of the afternoon?
But hypothetical problems aside, there are also more real, practical problems too. Getting
the entire globe to adopt a single time zone simply wouldn’t happen. Remember, there
are still countries in the world that have chosen not to adopt the metric system. But
it certainly wouldn’t just be the US that would be a problem, good luck convincing China,
Russia, India, Japan, and Australia to adopt the same time. So even if a world without
time zones would be beneficial, it just wouldn’t be feasible anyway.
Having a universal time zone in certain, specific circumstances does make sense, for example,
in aviation. This is why all pilots and air-traffic controllers use UTC, because absolute precision
is needed, and a complete lack of ambiguity is paramount. So in that sense, we already
do have a universal time - we just only use it when we need it.
There’s no doubt that time zones as they exist today are overly complex, and needlessly
convoluted, but this doesn’t mean that we should get rid of them altogether. Countries should
work together to make time zones simpler, and to strive to make them as logical as possible.
Getting rid of any time zones that are not to the nearest hour should be the first change,
and then we can take it from there.
Time zones are far from perfect, but so long as humans live in different parts of the world,
it looks like we’re stuck with them.
Now, for the second section of this video, I’m going to look at the question:
Do we really need Daylight Saving Time...?
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