Timezones.
Daylight saving time.
Leap seconds.
Regional exceptions.
If you simply want to know whether it's morning or afternoon, none of this matters much.
If you are an engineer maintaining systems that depend on accurate time, it becomes a fascinating mess.
I once implemented timezone support in software. It was enough to convince me that we may have reached peak complexity.
So here is my proposal:
The entire world should use UTC.
The military already does something similar with Zulu Time.
A pilot, a ship captain, and a commander can communicate precisely without asking:
"Which timezone?"
Imagine applying the same principle globally.
No timezone calculations.
No "Is that before or after daylight saving time?"
No being one hour late because two countries switched clocks on different dates.
People often object:
"But then I would go to work at 2 AM!"
Would you?
The sun would rise exactly when it rises today.
Your schedule would remain the same.
Only the numbers on the clock would change.
We already adapted to larger shifts.
When Slovakia adopted the euro, many people mentally converted prices for years.
Today we think natively in euros.
We could do the same with time.
And as a bonus:
The endless political debate about daylight saving time disappears overnight.
One clock.
One reference.
One global time.
Less chaos for the keepers of Chronos.
Tempus fugit. 😄
Author's Note
What started as an engineering observation gradually became a systems-design proposal.
The more interconnected the world becomes, the stranger local timezones feel. They made perfect sense when most communication was local. Today, meetings, software systems, financial markets, logistics networks, and online communities routinely operate across continents.
The military solved this long ago with Zulu Time.
Perhaps the civilian world will eventually reach the same conclusion.
Not because it is more natural.
But because it is simpler.
