Yesterday I was doing my usual evening routine, scrolling on TikTok like a raccoon digging through a glowing trash can, when I landed on a pilot’s account. He was explaining his flight route from Tokyo to Helsinki, and somewhere between clouds and coordinates he mentioned flying over the Diomede Islands.
That was the moment my brain short-circuited.
Because in his video, you could clearly see them. Two small islands sitting peacefully in the middle of the ocean, only four kilometers apart.
And yet one island is yesterday and the other is tomorrow.
Literally.
Little Diomede belongs to the United States. Big Diomede belongs to Russia. Between them runs the International Date Line, an invisible and completely made-up boundary.
So you can stand on Little Diomede on a Friday and look straight at Big Diomede where it is already Saturday. The same sun hits both islands. The same wind touches both shores. Nothing changes except the human rulebook.
That is the moment the illusion snapped for me. Someone, somewhere, simply decided that from this point onward it will be tomorrow, and four kilometers back it will be today.
Just like that. A bureaucratic doodle in the middle of the ocean decides what day you live in.
It made me realize how deeply artificial the whole idea of time is.
The Babylonians used a base 60 number system, and that mathematical obsession is the reason our hours have 60 minutes and our minutes have 60 seconds. Then the Egyptians came along and created the structure of the 24 hour day. They divided daylight into 12 parts and nighttime into another 12.
None of this came from the universe. It came from humans experimenting with numbers while trying to organize their lives.
Calendars are also invented. Early humans created them to survive, to track snow, planting seasons, and harvests. People needed to know when spring would arrive so they would not starve. That is it. Practical, not mystical.
Fast forward a few thousand years, and suddenly we have watches. Why? Factories. Meetings. Industrialization. Someone needed hundreds of workers to show up at the same moment, so eight in the morning became a thing.
The wild part is that people now pay thousands of euros for luxury watches so they can worship a system that exists nowhere in nature. There is no measurable moment in the universe called midnight. There are no cosmic weekdays. Trees do not panic about deadlines. Whales do not schedule calls.
Nature knows only one thing. Now.
But humans divide their lives into hours, minutes, weeks, deadlines, resolutions, milestones. Little cages made of numbers.
And the thing that really started itching my brain was this. Humans have managed to assign magical properties to completely man-made hours.
Like the witching hour. TikTok witches talk about midnight to four in the morning like it is this naturally enchanted window. But how can it be enchanted if the hour itself only exists because humans invented clocks?
There is nothing mystical about 00:00. It is just the moment our numbering system resets because we like cycles. Change the numbering system and the witching hour moves or disappears entirely.
So how can anything be magical if it collapses the second you change the rules?
It makes me wonder what is left of magic when even its supposed timing is manufactured.
And the same thing happens with the TikTok tarot girlies who scream about 11 11 and 222 and 333 like the universe is personally texting them. Honestly there is nothing magical about repeating numbers. It is just our brains getting a little hit of satisfaction because symmetry feels nice. That is it.
These numbers only feel special because humans created a numbering system and then decided that certain patterns are meaningful. But if the entire clock system is invented, then these so-called magical numbers are nothing more than visual rhythm tricking the brain into thinking something cosmic is happening.
And then there is Christmas. Why do we celebrate it on the 24th? Why is that particular winter evening holy? It could have been June 12th. It could have been the middle of August. The date was chosen, shifted, rearranged, and layered on top of older celebrations.
Same with Midsummer. Finns treat it like the night itself is enchanted just because the sun refuses to set. But the light has nothing to do with clocks or calendars. The Earth does not know it is June 21st. The universe does not whisper that Midsummer is the day to be mystical.
It is just daylight, and we decided to give it meaning. We pinned magic onto a measurement that does not exist in nature.
Even time travel falls apart once you see the illusion. You cannot travel back in time if time itself is something humans constructed to keep crops alive.
Take the eruption of Vesuvius. We do not know the exact date. Ancient writers recorded it months later, and archaeology disagrees with their memory. Walnuts found in the ruins, which ripen in autumn, suggest it happened in the fall, not in summer.
And this is exactly why you cannot just hop into some imaginary time machine, type in the date 24 August 79 AD, and expect to land anywhere meaningful. That date is man-made. It was written down by humans, copied and recopied for centuries, and is probably incorrect anyway because the eruption might have happened in October. Calendars have shifted multiple times throughout history. Months have been added, removed, renamed, reorganized. So if you give a machine a human-created date and expect it to drop you into that exact moment, good luck. You are not traveling to a real coordinate in nature. You are traveling to a human guess.
And even if you try to jump back in time, you face a ridiculous list of impossible variables. You would have to know the exact position of the Earth on its orbit at that past moment, the tilt of the Earth’s axis on that specific day, the precise rotation angle of the planet down to the millisecond, the wobble of the Earth, the movement of the entire solar system drifting through the galaxy, the movement of the galaxy itself, and the exact coordinates of your target location because the Earth will not be standing still waiting for you.
Earth spins at about 1300 kilometers per hour, rotates, orbits the sun, wobbles on its axis, and flies through space at absurd speeds. So if you jump back ten thousand days, you will almost certainly land in open ocean or in a completely different physical location than you intended simply because the planet has moved, tilted, rotated, and drifted.
Best case scenario. You materialize in water.
Worst case scenario. You pop into the vacuum of space because Earth is not where you assumed it would be.
Time travel does not fail because of philosophy. It fails because the coordinates literally do not line up.
What really gets me is how many people build their entire identity around time. They track productivity per hour. They set goals with exact dates. They obsess over who they should be by a certain Monday in December.
But the truth is that if humans stopped using calendars and clocks tomorrow, nothing in nature would change. The world would not collapse. We would still exist. We would still breathe. We would still be here.
Just like those Diomede Islands. Islands under the same sun, the same sky, the same moment, pretending to live in different days because someone drew a line on a map.
So the question that keeps looping in my head is this.
Why are we so obsessed with time?
Why did we take something fluid, alive, natural, the raw experience of simply being, and squeeze it into boxes that we now treat like law?
Maybe time was never the important thing.
Maybe presence is.
I finished writing this at 11:11 on a chilly Thursday in South of Spain.
"This is beautifully written and a bit of a shock to the system. But it also got me thinking: don’t we actually have a fundamental, natural clock?
I’m talking about the cycle of day and night. It doesn’t have numbers or hours attached to it, but it is a logical, undeniable rhythm that our bodies are wired to follow. As humans, I think we inherently crave that kind of structure to function.
The Ancient Greeks actually had the perfect vocabulary for this dilemma. They didn't just have one word for time, they had two:
Chronos: This is clock time. Linear, measurable, ticking away. It’s the time of deadlines and train schedules. This is exactly what you are critiquing here.
Kairos: This is the 'right moment.' It’s qualitative. It’s that instinctive feeling of knowing when it’s time to sleep, or the perfect moment to kiss someone. This is 'natural' time.
So maybe the problem isn't that we invented time, but that in our modern world, we’ve allowed Chronos (the rigid clock) to completely dominate Kairos (the felt moment). We’ve prioritized the schedule over the rhythm."
Ps: I do love the southern part of Spain. We try to get there twice year!!
Yes, that is exactly what I was talking about, but I had no idea the Greeks actually had terminology for this phenomenon. I should really read more of their philosophers, because honestly it’s all Greek to me, pun fully intended.
And you’re right, the light–dark rhythm exists without any numbers at all. We’re the ones who forced counting onto it and then convinced ourselves that the numbers were somehow real. It is so messed up when you really start looking at it. The rhythm is natural, but the counting definitely isn’t.
And I’m glad to hear you love the south of Spain. I’ve been here 11 years already, and I’m not going anywhere.
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