9.20.25: Time Zone Problems

I once thought time zones were just annoying math problems, but living abroad made me see them as tiny personal dystopias. My morning coffee overlaps with someone else’s midnight breakdown. Friends message in bursts while I’m asleep, so I wake to digital ghosts—unanswered conversations frozen mid-thought. It makes you feel like you’re running parallel lives, always slightly misaligned. Maybe that’s the real horror of globalization. Not climate collapse or robots stealing jobs, but the inability to ever be fully present in the same hour as the people you care about most. Always ten minutes late to their reality.