If you're used to date changes happening "whenever", you'd stop assuming they happen at a fixed point during the day.

Any argument that starts with "Today, we're already confused about ... because we're used to date changes occurring while we sleep" is meaningless, since we wouldn't be used to date changes occurring while we sleep.

The whole terminology thing would be solved by having two words; one meaning "after next sleep cycle" (which would probably be more common when speaking to people in your own geographic region), and one meaning "after next date change" (which would probably be more common when speaking to people in other geographic regions). The appearance of this second word would likely happen naturally within weeks, if not days after abolishing time zones. As usually happens with language.

The argument against abolishing time zones always seems to assume that humanity would be incapable of adapting to a time zone free world. Like this would mysteriously be the first and only change in the history of mankind society couldn't adapt to.

But that's not the case. We're not all cosmopolitans traveling the world all the time. For anyone living in a timezone where 00:00 happens when most people are asleep, there'd only be one word for tomorrow, as it'd be synonymous for "after date change" and "after the next sleep cycle". There would be no other word, because there is no need for that. Except in circles where coordinating meetings with people across the globe happens on a regular basis. But we already got that figured out by explicitly naming the time zone or using UTC.

The vast majority of people don't have to deal with this, so having the date change at night is just more convenient, as it completely avoids this ambiguity in day to day life.

But obviously as a nerd you get hung up on that one aspect and go "but imagine we had only one timezone, we could just say 13:00 and there'd be no ambiguity, no chance for a misunderstanding, it would be so much more efficient and coherent!"

> The argument against abolishing time zones always seems to assume that humanity would be incapable of adapting to a time zone free world.

Again, you need to take a step back and try to look at this from the average person's pov, not as a scientist trying to find the optimal solution for a problem 99% of people don't have. And "people would be able to adapt to this" Is a pretty weak argument. You could probably also change the clock itself so that there's 63 seconds in a minute, 59 minutes in an hour, and 195 hours in a day. I'm sure people could adapt to this. Doesn't make it a good argument.

On the other hand, just imagine the sheer chaos this switchover would cause worldwide, for what, marginal gains in convenience for a miniscule amount of people.

It reminds me of "that guy" who constantly wants to refactor half the codebase because something would look a little cleaner then, and if you let them, they'll end up refactoring the same part of the code over and over again every six months because they had another idea how to make it even more streamlined and elegant. And then someone else comes in wanting to implement a simple feature, but is greeted with an incomprehensible construct, while the refactoring-guy is repeatedly and excitedly reassuring them that it's "really simple and intuitive once you get the hang of it".

Meanwhile, I know what the word desert means, even if I have never been in a country that has one. I know what a cyclone is, even if I've never seen one. We're affected by, and have knowledge of more than our local environment. We read books. We watch TV and movies. Heck, we're having this discussion in a language that that isn't spoken in the country I'm living in. Most people do, in fact, interact in some way with people in other time zones right now. Perhaps not on a daily basis, but at least a bit.

It just occurred to me; if we placed the meridian in the Pacific, very few people would have the date change during their sleep cycle. Sucks to be Niue, I suppose ;)

By the way - I'm not even for abolishing time zones. I'm just spectacularly tired of the straw man arguments against it. It's like saying "we couldn't build a city that's on both sides of the river, because people would drown when they go to work", as if building a bridge would be an impossibility.

There is a perfectly good argument against it btw, which is the one you propose at the end. The change itself wouldn't really be worth it. But that's simply because people are confused by changes. Not because the end result would be worse.