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. 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.
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