The Midnight Hour

You know, there is something about the midnight hour. Military time aside, the midnight hour is socially accepted to be the first hour of the day, but numerically it is the last number in the cycle. Why would that be the custom, to link first and last in this way? Is there some social or developmental reason behind it, or is it a function of how a circle works as a shape for marking time, where if you plan to make more than one cycle out to be your day then there will necessarily be some sort of overlap in the hours, forming a disconnect between commonly accepted time keeping methods and the intrinsic logic of arithmetic/linear progression? 

Furthermore, why are we not all on military time? Is there some hidden or historically commonly believed benefit to circling a clock twice rather than once in a day? It's not even like the switch overs (12->1) have anything to do with daylight and nightfall, so what is, or likely was, the purpose? Was it just a matter of the first clockworking techniques being too imprecise or resulting in too small of a clock to provide an accurate measurement or observation of time that was based on a day being represented by the traversing of a marker around a circle once?

I have long suspected that there may be some intentional confusion seeded into our measurement of time. Even something as subtle as needing to remember that 12am is actually the first full hour of any day, and at 1am you start the second hour, takes an amount of subconscious processing, and perhaps at times conscious processing. Then you consider that those who originally determined time measurements could have instead said that the hour is 1/10th of the day, the minute 1/100th of the hour, and the second 1/100th of the minute and the calculations associated with time would be much simpler and more scalable, and one starts to get suspicious. While some might say it is like "the foot" or "the stone" and people used what they had available initially to develop the measurements of things, if one were splitting up larger things (days, hours, etc.) into smaller things (minutes, seconds, etc.) they must have had at least the basics of math/division down. So given the base 10 system, why would they have made it more complicated than it needed to be? In this light it is clear that it is not a question of if making seconds and minutes a more cumbersome 60 to 1 ratio (over the 10 or 100 to 1 ratios) was intentional, but rather asking what purpose was intended in establishing time in this way? Circular logic could make sense here, as seconds and minutes are also terms in the demarcation of circumferences of circles, but if that were the thought process then why decide the day was 24 hours rather than 36 or some such?

I feel the smoking gun of this theory, which is unsurprisingly angled at suggesting that the way we track time is designed to keep us off balance even if primarily on a subconscious level, are the months in the year in western society. We could have 13 months a year, 12 with 28 days, precisely 4 weeks, and the 13th with 29, and it would work out and be kept track of in a much smoother way. How many times do you think you have asked in your lifetime "how many days does this month have?" Similarly to the alphabet song there is the days of the month jingle; people also have hand methods to recall the lengths of each month and personally I find myself referencing a calendar nearly every month to determine what day of the week rent is coming due. All of these methods must be mentally stored or externally accessible just so that the populace can keep track of a dating system with 12 months in it. Imagine a world where you knew exactly which month had 29 days (and in leap years this same month could have 30, to keep things straightforward), rather than the current system where there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which months have 30 verses 31 allotted days, much less why there is one month with 28 in the mix. In terms of processing power, our current system of months takes up more than what is required in our minds; in this same way but to a lesser degree for an everyday citizen so do the hours in a day, and the ratio between seconds, minutes, and hours. I have heard that "the internet" is about the weight of a strawberry, which is to say that all of the additionally stored energy in the servers to differentiate between 0 and 1 combined can be measured, using E=mc^2, as being about the mass of an average strawberry. I wonder how much the collective weight would be for the portion of human minds partitioned off to track the days of the month or remember common multiples and portions of the number 60, strictly for time keeping purposes. 

Moreso than mass though, I wonder how much RAM is taken up in our minds due to suboptimal measurement techniques, or how much slower our brains operate due to this unbalanced measurement system. I have heard that a single email notification can cost an employee several minutes of efficiency, even if the email was something they did not need to read- the processing loss is not primarily about the direct time spent on something, but about how long it takes to shift gears back and forth between tasks as well. How many of these weeds (effectively) litter our minds, making our own personal wheat harvest of meaningful thought in a day that much slower going? Anyone who has felt overwhelmed by all the minutiae of day to day life is familiar with that of which I speak.

At Babel God confused language; could it be that at some point since Babel time measurement was intentionally confused as well for similar reasons? This is what I ponder in this midnight hour: if the obvious sabotage of the simplicity of calculating and scaling time is our own naive doing, God's doing, or an unseen enemy's plot.