On the eve of November the first, while Americans buzzed with anticipation of the midterm elections and worried that they caught Ebola from their neighbors because they went to Egypt for their honeymoon four years ago, something groundbreaking occurred: time changed. Our clocks, which under any normal circumstances would have struck 2:00 a.m. in the moment succeeding 1:59 a.m., decided that they had too much fun in the last hour to just give all that up to satisfy the laws of time, and instead read 1 a.m. all…over…again… And none but the common stoner (who rejoiced at the notion of Domino’s being open for a whole extra hour!) even gave it a second thought. The President gets a new dog and it’s national news, but the government literally changes time and no one bats an eye. How is this disconcerting to no one?

           Now, no one complains the night our clocks “Fall Back” one hour, and we are able to enjoy one more precious hour of sleep (or one more raging Daylight Savings Party hour depending on your lifestyle), but inevitably in the days that follow, morale tanks. You’ll probably hear the phrase “Wow it gets dark so early now!” uttered every day at twilight until you either reach Winter Solstice or spontaneously combust (if you’re one of the lucky seven billion yet to do so). And that’s because it’s a serious bummer. This polite but annoying jest that we are all guilty of uttering hides our deeper feelings of anger toward night’s encroachment on our time to bask in the Sun. And on some level, it conveys a general mistrust for the system in which, for half a year, entire nations decide it’s a different time than it is actually scientifically proven to be. I’m not saying Daylight Savings is stupid. I’m saying all attempts to regulate time are stupid. 

           Time is entirely a manmade concept- and a savvy one at that. Time-keeping is an absolute necessity in an organized, developed world. Why, then, have we convoluted it to the point where it’s considered “one of those things no one really understands” like calculus or why straight men willingly wear salmon pants?

           Time zones are where it all seemed to go awry. If we were to decide, as a planet, that at this very moment it’s 12:00 p.m. everywhere, would that be such a crazy thing? Who’s to say that it’s 10:27 p.m. in New York and 4:27 a.m. in Brussels? Or better yet that it’s 5:30 p.m. in Ohio but 4:30 p.m. when you walk down the road and cross an imaginary line into Indiana? Sure, for some of us the Sun would rise at 10 p.m., but who cares? A slight schedule shift and all is the same- only communication and travel are infinitely easier. And by doing this, we can gain a worldwide commonality in a way that we never truly have. There is no universal currency or universal language, but with a universal time, you can call up someone from Ghana just to figure out if you’re late for your tee time. Granted, the rate for making such a phone call makes it highly impractical especially considering that just by taking out your phone you would know what time it is…but you could still do it, and if you’re an impractical, fiscally irresponsible dreamer like me, that’s all that matters.