We treat the 24-hour clock like a law of nature instead of what it actually is: a convention, agreed upon, arbitrary at the edges, and mostly unquestioned because questioning it is inconvenient.

Sixty minutes to an hour. Twenty-four hours to a day. None of it is inevitable — it’s just old, and old things tend to get mistaken for permanent.

This piece is short on purpose. Some ideas don’t need three thousand words to land.