Examples of Man Trying to Control Nature
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Things Which Are Arbitrary
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Why Even Bother?
Daylight Saving Time came and went, much without incident, even when we were expecting the worst. I guess that proves that when you expect the worst and the unexpected happens, it's really not all that bad in the end.
DST did make me think about the nature of time and how none of it makes any difference anyway. See, time is this intangible thing. I can't touch it. Niether can you. But we all know it. It's really nothing more than a measurement, so it's no more real than a centimeter or an inch. Time is how we measure the sun's progress through our skies (and I don't want to be corrected by some heliocentric theory-proving smartass, either; I know how it works, I'm just being romantic).
So man creates time as a measure of this and somehow we decide that one sun-cycle should be broken up into twenty-four pieces called hours and that those should each be busted up into sixty smaller segments called minutes and that (probably for the sake of accuracy) minutes are really a sequence of sixty even smaller units, seconds, but for all humanity's infinite wisdom, we manage to contradict ourselves in correction after we realize that we were off by some tiny margin in our initial assessment of this breakdown. That twenty-four count of hours should probably have been a little closer to a twenty-five count. And the assessment, after all, was more than just a little bit off.
What was decided was that one year (previously considered to be consisted of 365 days) was 365 ¼ days. So we were underestimating. So now every four years, we throw an extra day in for good measure, to prove ourselves right. But there's nothing to prove except that we were wrong.
Where did we go wrong? Was it when we decided that the day should be twenty-four hours long when it should have been more like thirty? Was it when we decided an hour should be sixty minutes when in reality it should have been seventy-five? Or when we realized that our measurement of one minute was nine hundred seconds too short? The answer, of course, is none of the above.
Where we went wrong was deciding that we as humans could control nature. The sun rises and falls when it's going to and, since Earth is tilted, most likely any breakdown of time measurements we could create would be somewhat inaccurate. I'm not the only person to realize this. Obviously someone else came to this conclusion first, because for about half the year, the United States of America pretends that we're reliving an hour just so we can sleep and work better. Time, as an intagible entity that doesn't really exist, marches on while our perception of it changes dramatically. It's like time travelling. At two AM on the fourth Sunday of November (I think), our clocks are supposed to jettison straight back to one AM. Then in the springtime, when the clock strikes two, we leap straight to three o'clock in the morning. We first create time and then dispose of it. Our days are just as long, just a little brighter. Here's a diagram.
So you see, we live 1 AM twice on November's fateful day, and disregard 2 AM completely in March just to suit our needs of having daylight to work in. Since daylight is overrated anyway, and since we actually have the ability to do this, I can safely conclude that time is just a way for man to attempt to control something which he created. If time were really nature, we wouldn't be able to do this. You can't disregard what is obviously there.
And if this spelling-out of what you're all already aware of didn't help you see it any better, perhaps this will serve as proof that none of it matters anyway. I don't eat lunch at noon. I eat lunch when my stomach growls. My hunger is not controlled by time. It is controlled by my nature of consumption and excretion. So why bother changing the time if all it means is that my stomach will growl an hour earlier?
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