11 Oct 2026 2 min read

(Most) Everything is a Social Construct

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This is a thought experiment. It's fun to think about, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

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I'm talking about things like labels and theories in this post. Morals are a different thing.

Most everything is a social construct. I thought about titling this post "Everything is a Social Construct" but I decided that was to clickbait-y. You're welcome. This thought came to me somewhat recently and it's an interesting thing to think about. We are taught things are black and white, but what if there is some gray mixed in. What makes us so certain that our way is the only correct way?

Why do we call anything what we do at the moment? The only reason something is "wrong" now is because someone decided that there was only one correct answer (logical things like math don't apply here, although you could argue some parts of math IMO 😉). For example, why do we call the animal below a sheep? If someone hadn't decided that was the right answer, why couldn't we call them a cow? In cases like language it makes some sense because we have to have a common way to reference things, but why was it called that. Usually things like this don't bother me, since we have to have standards for communication and to help everyone be in agreement. I can't remember if I've ever said it here, but I think we should switch to metric. If I believed all social constructs were bad, I wouldn't think that.

white sheep on green grass during daytime — Photo by Sam Carter / Unsplash

They've recently been talking about getting rid of time change at a national level in the US. Some states have done it, but this would be a federal law. I don't necessarily think the following is a good idea, but why couldn't we get rid of time zones as well. I'm going to use 24-hour time in this example for simplicity. It may feel weird, but why does 13:00 have to be day? The only reason we believe that is because someone told us that. If we got rid of time zones, we wouldn't have to deal with trying to schedule things across time zones. Your 10:00 would be my 10:00. You would have different work hours as people that are currently in different time zones and it would be a different part of the daylight cycle, but the number is just a label. You would just pick a time that is work hours for both of you, but instead of it being 13:00 for one of you and 9:00 for the other it would just be 13:00. Even though this is setting a standard (which is against my social construct idea) it's removing the construct of time zones for for the sake of an example.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of the examples in this post are a good idea or something that should be done. There may be repercussions that I’m not thinking of or it may just be a bad idea. I just think it's interesting how most things are just arbitrary decisions made by someone years ago.