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Are you constantly tired in the mornings?
When your alarm goes off, do you smash it with a hammer?
Has your morning alarm-clock-smashing routine gotten to be such a problem that your wife
is threatening to leave you?
Are you spiraling into poverty due to the cost of replacing all the destroyed alarm
clocks?
Well, I have some good news: your morning struggles might not be your fault.
Maybe you don’t have anger management issues.
Maybe you’re just on the wrong side of a time zone.
You see, much like typewriters and the concept of regular bathing, time zones didn’t exist
until the late 1800s.
Back in the day, in a more honest time, towns oriented their clocks based on the sun.
When the sun reached its highest point in the sky—solar noon, as the cool kids called
it—towns set their clocks to noon o’clock.
But of course, the sun can’t be everywhere at once—that’s a power reserved only for
Nebula ads in HAI videos—so every town had a slightly different time.
This didn’t matter much back when people travelled by wagon and communicated via swoopy
cursive on dead tree, but over time, as folks traded in horses for trains and sails for
steam power, the fact that every town had its own time made it close to impossible to
schedule transportation, organize meetups, and conduct business across distance.
And so, some rich white businessmen decided to do what rich white businessmen do best:
increase their profits by unilaterally changing how the rest of the world lived.
This was the result: time zones.
While this map may look like it was drawn by a 12-year-old, drunk on chocolate syrup,
it actually represents a carefully-calibrated compromise between building our days around
solar noon, and a standardized, universal time.
No longer were towns separated by twelve minutes, or sixty-nine minutes, or four-twenty minutes,
but by clean, family-friendly hour increments, which greatly relieved the headaches of countless
mustachioed, boiler-hat-wearing businessmen who could now invest all their newly organized
time in union-busting and accumulating unprecedented wealth.
But, while the time zone system has served us honorably for a century-and-a-half, recently
some pesky scientists have used a bunch of dumb, fake-sounding stuff called “facts”
and “data” and “evidence” to show that time zones are creating some real health
issues.
Humans, you see, have been around a lot longer than clocks, and through some Darwinian
process of some sort, humans came up with their own biological clock: get up with the
sun, hunt the mammoths and giant sloths by day, draw some sweet battle scenes on cave
walls at dusk, then go to bed at dark.
And although we don't live like that anymore because our selfish ancestors came up with
extravagant inventions like “agriculture” and “electricity” and “not dying of
dysentery,” we’re still programmed to get up with the sun and go to bed when it’s
dark.
With time zones though, some of us are getting up with the sun, while others are getting
up while it’s still dark.
Take, for example, two towns in the Central Time Zone: Pensacola, Florida, on the time
zone’s eastern edge, and Lubbock, Texas on its western edge.
Now although these towns are similar in the fact that they both have silly names and we
should feel bad for the people who live there—there’s one key differentiating factor: in Pensacola,
the sun rises a whole hour before it does in Lubbock.
That means, if you have to wake up at 6:30am in Pensacola, the sun will be up, but if you
wake up at 6:30am in Lubbock, you’re starting off the day in the dark, with sunrise not
coming for another hour.
That really sucks for the people in Lubbock, because having to wake up in the dark is much
harder on your inner cave-man clock than waking up with the sun.
Plus, it’s kind of a no-win scenario, because if you live in Lubbock, Texas, even once the
sun does finally come up, you’ll still be living in Lubbock, Texas.
The thing is, for those who live on the western side of these overly wide time zones, a later
sunrise means more reliance on artificial light, more artificial light means more disruptions
to one’s circadian rhythm—which is fancy science-talk for your internal cave-man clock—and
more disruptions leads to a number of bad things, varying from stress to higher rates
of disease and cancer.
Getting out of rhythm with your cave-man clock also leads to something scientists call “social
jet lag,” which surprisingly is not when you stay up until 4am doom-scrolling twitter,
but is actually a term for an out-of-rhythm sleep schedule that leaves one feeling constantly
tired, irritable, and unable to concentrate.
All-in-all then, without the sun there to gently kiss your cheek as you wake up, all
you sorry time zone leftists are more likely to be tired, get grumpy, and even develop
objectively not funny health problems, which is why, the next time you wake up on the wrong
side of the bed, you should consider that it might be because you were on the wrong
side of a time zone.
If you live on the left side of a time-zone and are sad about the fact that you might
die, sooth your sorrow through the powers of capitalism!
So, you know how streaming services are expensive—they cost $8 or $10 or $12 a month.
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I’ve got two Nebula originals coming out this month, and the only way to see them is
with a subscription.
With the current sale pricing, now is the time to sign up, so make sure to do so over
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