This video was made possible by CuriosityStream. Get the best deal in streaming—both CuriosityStream
and Nebula bundled together—for less than $15 a year at CuriosityStream.com/HAI. 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. Well, CuriosityStream is the opposite of expensive—some
might call it… unexpensive? That’s because, with the current sale pricing,
it costs less than $15 a year. That’s about the cost of a movie ticket,
but with this, you don’t have to sneak candy by a sad teenager because you can watch CuriosityStream
and Nebula on your TV, tablet, phone, or computer. Of course, CuriosityStream is the place to
go if you’re looking for documentaries by big names like Jane Goodall and Chris Hadfield—like
this very highly rated one about the Winnebago salesman who became the subject of one of
the internet’s earliest viral videos—while Nebula is where to go if you’re looking
for bigger-budget stuff by the smaller names—like me. 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 at CuriosityStream.com/HAI, and you’ll be
supporting the channel while you’re at it.
