this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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The point isn't arbitrary. It's the winter solstice. It just drifted a bit due to history and stuff.
It's Xmas that highjacked the winter solstice. New year used to be the start of spring (March) then the Romans decided to acknowledge the first 2 months, and then changed the start of the year to January so they could elect some officials to govern Spain instead of waiting an extra 2 months. It's about as arbitrary as it can get.
https://youtu.be/RrGHtl5qJfk About 24 minutes in to skip to ^
Is the fact that the start of spring is 2 months after the solstice arbitrary? Seems a pretty clear cause and effect.
But honestly we should make a new calendar that starts on the spring solstice, is subdivided by solstices, and doesn't have weeks (I just don't like them).
It'd still be a mess anyway. How do you subdivide your two year halves? What do your months look like? If they still exist.
Assuming you use equinoxes too, you can split your year in 4... Except since you've got 365 days to split, it will never be a perfect split.
And turns out the Earth doesn't care about synchronizing rotation and revolution and the year is actually about 365.24 days. so you still have freaking leap days every four years, except not every hundred year, except yes please every 400. Or whatever rule you make to fix the inevitable deviation.
I mean we define year as being from one spring equinox¹ to the next, no matter if it's 365 or 366 days. So if we made next year 1 it would be from 20th of March 2026 14:46 UTC to the next 20th of march 2027 20:25 UTC (The first day of the year could be day 0, the last of the old year but still also in new year, to account for the fact that it's not midnight.). The months would be replaced with quarters(seasons), ending on: June 21, September 23, December 21. Every year the dates would slightly shift because of the way orbits work, but there is no leap year math.
The first quarter, spring, has 93 days, the second, summer, 94 and so on. These will probably be subdivided a multitude of ways. Quickly sketching I found 6 * 4 * 4 - (3 or 4) which seems to work, though I'm naturally draw to base6 due to it being highly composite. This makes 24 days in a quarter-season. A nice analogue to the hours.
I think this calendar works better because it doesn't attempt to add any human control over a completely chaotic system: Earths orbit speed and rotational period. The underlying principle is chaotic and humans should build systems that are build on top of this natural disorder. By attempting to define and control disorder you must create so many convoluted rules (Like the leap day rule). Our calendar is an example of the human desire to "fix" nature to our own way of life instead of leaning to coexist with the natural disorderly processes that govern our lives. It's the same mindset that gives us the blatant disregard for the natural resources or climate.
This is a rather anarchic position but that's because I cannot help but inject anarchic rhetoric into my thought process due to so much of the way we live has been in blatantly build using archic concepts, even the calendar is dripping with it.
¹: Accidentally called it solstice sense I forgot there's a different word.
Because I don't really have anything better to do today I made a JS generator for this calendar: https://codeberg.org/anaVal/misc/src/branch/main/cal.
Here is the full year 1 I generated using it:
Interestingly the 1st days of the 4th quarters are quite close to the starts of Gregorian months (June 1st, September 2nd, Dec 5th, March 4th).
And because I really can't help myself here is a static file version of the same calendar: https://files.catbox.moe/idfrdf.html. Running this is as easy as downloading the file and dragging it into your browser. Thanks to being able to quickly move between the years you can really see how little actually changes between them. I think this could actually be a viable calendar.
The 365.2422 days per celestial year is a math error we can fix.
We need to adjust the length of days and seconds but we can get rid of it completely if we wanted to.
It's not like noon means the maximum of the suns arc or sunset and sunrise don't already shift throughout the year.
The only thing that stops it is the momentum of a human measurement error.
If we use 366 we just get slightly shorter days by about 3 minutes. All of these time measurements are more arbitrary than feet and inches. Science back filled the bullshit with physical constants and there is no reason we cannot tie a proper system into alternative physics constants.
A year is a rotation of seasons. It has nothing to do with the day-night cycle. That should absolutely be separate.
And the 365.2422 isn't a math error. It's a mathematic ratio, rotation around the sun / rotation around itself. and it should absolutely be upheld.
The mathematical error os not basing our time counting on that ratio. The number is only 365.2422 because our second, hours, days are too long/short.
We can just decide we want one rotation to be exactly 366 units and then work backwards from there to determine new units.
So you'd support a "day" unit of time that has no relation with the times the sun is rising and setting?
if your "day" is exactly a 365th or 366th of a year, you'll have to work with with the fact a specific hour like 12PM would gradually deviate to be any time from sun's zenith to the middle of the night.
Days are defined by a different natural cycle, that of the earth's rotation around its axis. That happens 365.2422 times every time we go around the sun. You can't just assign the length of a day to something more convenient
A day is defined as a single rotation around earths axis. A year is a single rotation around the sun. The 356.2422 is the result of those two definitions. Earth takes 356.2422 rotations around its axis to rotate around the sun. That is a fact. You could define a unit to be 366th of a rotation around the sun, you could even call it a day, but as a result you lose the reason a day is a useful unit: It's the time it takes for earth to spin around its axis, a far more useful definition than 366th of a year.
I propose we make the calender a nice round 360 days, then have a roughly 5-6 day holiday for new New year around the spring equinox.
Excellent calendar idea, excellent post. What do you think about using solar noon instead of time zones?
If you like the idea you'll probably appreciate the comment I just left were I made a program to generate it.
Time zones are complicated. One one side I like them because 12 is always noon which means you can get used to the sunset times. On the other hand I think the time shouldn't be related to sunrise at all and everyone should use UTC (or equivalent). Let sunrise and sunset be their own thing. Again let's not try and contain nature but instead define a simple method and just use that. Let the natural world tick according to it's own clock. We have our own atomic ones.
This also brings me to the idea that we should just use a single clock. Take an atomic clock, make it start counting and build all timekeeping around it. Basically the same thing computers are doing but for everyone. Let Sunrise, Noon, Year all be it's own thing and have a single timestamp for most timekeeping. Due to liking base6 I'd advocate for this timestamp to be in base6 instead of base10. By using it we are going to get an intuition of how much some length of time is that is separate from days.
Thanks, I'll check that out. A big part of what I liked about your calendar is the direct correlation to a natural cycle though, and I like the idea of solar noon for the same reasons. The idea isn't to constrain nature but acknowledge it and adapt ourselves, centering days on the sun's zenith at ones location just makes intuitive sense to me and lines up with my own perception of time when disconnected from infrastructure. Completely useless and impractical computationally, but very well aligned with a human sense of place in both time and space
One of the more interesting calendar concepts I've heard where every date falls on the same day of the week year after year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke%E2%80%93Henry_Permanent_Calendar
This was the first thing that made me realise that calendars could be changed. I myself don't like it because it because It doesn't use fixed points. But it is an inspiration for the calendar that I described in the other comment. It's the "don't do this" kind of inspiration but I think it counts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGHtl5qJfk&t=1412 ?
But it's the middle of summer!
Ssh! If the northern hemisphere people figure out how awesome summer Christmas and new years is we'll never get rid of them.
The fact that the other hemisphere exists did cross my mind, but I decided to ignore it because clarifying would have reduced the quippy nature of the comment.
The comic is also saying that the entire world lives by the Gregorian calendar but that isn't true as well.
It's all good, you're still technically correct. The Gregorian calendar is based off of Europeans, so it would still be originated from their winter solstice.
But it isn't. Winter solstice already happened before Christmas. New Year, un our current culture, is 100% arbitrary.
It's distorted by a fuckton of history and stuff, including the invention of yearly calendars and manipulating them over millenia, plus whatever christianity added to the mix, but it's not arbitrary.
It is now.
I can imagine it started the way so that January 1st falls on solstice. But it doesn't so the date we set as New Year is pretty arbitrary.
I don't see how this is so heavily downvoted...? It makes complete sense that humans (by far most of which live in the northern hemisphere) would celebrate that the darkest days have passed and that we're heading from a dark and harsh winter towards a promise of spring. Coming from the north, I can definitely testify to the fact that you feel in your whole body that the days start getting longer.
The fact that the exact date is slightly off basically amounts to a rounding error, and making a point out of it is just pedantic.
It's a fuckton of "history and stuff", including the invention of yearly calendars and manipulating them over millenia, plus whatever christianity added to the mix, but yes, it's not arbitrary.
edit: my apologies for the Northern hemispherism.
I was going to point out that if it isn't, in fact, the winter solstice, then it is arbitrary.
But I decided to start the new year without the pretentiousness and pedantic proclamations
Shit, if we all do that, it's gonna be real quiet around here.
We'll just enjoy the silence.
♪All I ever wanted. All I ever needed. Is Here. In my arms. Words are very unnecessary, They can only do harm.
There's always room for more humble brags
That's not true though. The date is significant and not arbitrary, it's just not the winter solstice (anymore).
Actually, there is no such thing as a 'winter solstice.' The start of the Northern winter is the start of the Southern summer.
Sure. But none of that makes New Years Day arbitrary by virtue of it not being, in fact, the winter solstice.
If you use the equinoxes or the solstices you're still being arbitrary because there are two of each.
January 4 is the day of the year that the Earth is closest to the Sun [perihelion] That would be a good date, but there will be those who argue for stating the year when Earth is furthest away.
Okay, but why would that mean that New Years Day not being the winter solstice makes it arbitrary to celebrate on Jan 1?
It's arbitrary because there's no moment that is the obvious beginning of the cycle.
That's the very definition of 'arbitrary'
That moment is the moment the Julian calendar restarts. It's not arbitrary at all, and certainly not made so by virtue of it not being the/a winter solstice (your original statement).
Actually this is a fair point. What counts as arbitrary? For me the slight drift is just due to the way calendars and culture works, and while it is more arbitrary than having it on the solstice. It is less arbitrary than having it on your(anyone who happens to read this) birthday. It's ultimately a matter of where you draw the baseline. Even if new year was on the winter solstice you could still argue that it's arbitrary because there are four others. Arbitrarity is relative.
The UTC is completely 100% arbitrary. The only reason it's there is because an observatory happened to be on a specific hill, and then it drifted a bit (like most human things do), but the UTC/GMT has since it's conception been completely arbitrary measurement. There isn't a way to define a 0 latitude on a rotating sphere without making it an arbitrary point.
So idiots.... 🫣