My five-year experiment with UTC

Role and value of local time zones

• Time zones encode “time of day” and shared culture: “up at 5am for a flight” or “home late” instantly conveys early/late without extra explanation.
• People generally care about where an event sits in the light–dark cycle and workday/week pattern, not its absolute offset from England.
• Time zones roughly align calendar days with “natural” days so that a new date usually starts while most people sleep, avoiding confusion like appointments crossing a date boundary mid‑day.
• Critics of abolition say that local schedules are still governed by sun and culture; without time zones you’d need lookup tables for what 08:00 UTC “means” in each place, effectively recreating zones.

Critiques of living by UTC / abolishing time zones

• Using UTC personally adds friction to everyday local life: store hours, trains, flights, and social plans all require constant conversion.
• Jet lag and local sleep cycles don’t disappear: going to bed at “21:00 UTC” after travel may mean sleeping at noon locally.
• People working in facilities that used a “master time” report persistent confusion and ad‑hoc fixes (e.g., taped “+1” for DST).
• Several view “time zones should be abolished” as a form of programmer utopianism that underestimates social and biological constraints. Others argue the article is more of a voluntary experiment than an authoritarian prescription.

Arguments in favor of UTC / global time

• Strong consensus that UTC is best for logs, servers, telemetry, and cross‑region debugging; it avoids DST chaos and ambiguous local timestamps.
• Some remote workers and travelers find a single personal baseline (UTC) simplifies reasoning about multiple colleagues’ zones, especially when DST rules differ.
• Advocates argue that inherent complexity is “people keep different hours”, not time zones; a global standard could reduce repeated conversions and DST mistakes.

Alternatives and incremental improvements

• Many propose 24‑hour clocks everywhere to eliminate AM/PM confusion; “06:00pm” formats are widely disliked.
• Various alternative schemes are mentioned (Swatch .beat time, letter codes, metric time, solar‑offset time, continuous longitude‑based time), but are generally seen as clever curiosities rather than realistic replacements.
• Broad agreement that abolishing DST is a more practical near‑term goal than abolishing time zones themselves.