If you think time is natural. It’s not.
This conversation is inspired by Will, “Whatever happened to meet me at high noon?”, where he traces how we moved from living by the sun to living by standardized time — and never really questioned it.
What starts as a conversation about daylight savings turns into something much bigger: how systems are imposed, normalized, and eventually become invisible.
And once you see it in time, you start seeing it everywhere — in work, in sports, in culture.
If you want to go deeper, read Will’s full piece on the TIP website. It’s one of those articles that changes how you think about something you experience every single day.
Whatever happened to, “meet me at high noon?”
In the Eastern Time Zone during the summer, 12 noon on my Apple Watch is actually closer to 1:30pm by the sun. Solar noon (the moment the sun is highest in the sky) doesn’t happen until mid-afternoon. When my clock says “lunchtime,” my circadian rhythm is saying “nap time.” When I hit the 2pm wall, my body thinks it’s 3:30.
