Today is April 1, 2020, Wednesday, at least in Albania. In some other places, it's April 2nd.
At some level, time is an illusion. As three-dimensional creatures we are, we must obey the advancement of time, but our perceptions of time are invented. People invented the year. People invented the month. People invented the day, the hour, the minute, the second.
These partitions are not arbitrary - it really takes about 365 days to make a full rotation around the sun - but the creation of these partitions was not inevitable. Our numerical system is based on the tenth most likely because we have ten fingers; we understand time as we understand it simply because we evolved on this planet, revolving around this sun.
Time, at least the time we understand it, is also a by-product of capitalism. In his 1967 scientific article, "Labor Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," EP Thompson writes that in the early cultures of mankind, time splits were a general way of understanding when the sun was rising and when it was setting, when the seasons were changing. . But as industrialization returned to normal, time became a mechanized system that no longer employed those who invented it. Increasingly, we were serving the time because in this way those who owned the capital could better monitor those who worked.
At the most basic level, we will always understand time. The sun rises, the sun sets. Even though we may be inside, and this process proves more difficult, nothing undoes the day and night cycle. What is lost as one day is transformed into another is the mechanical definition of time, the capitalist definition of time, the industrial definition of time. We don't know what day it is, but we know it's a new day.
Source: Vox
