You read the title correctly. I hate the current calendar most of the world prescribes to. For many reasons. Reasons that I will divulge in right now.

The Gregorian Calendar was introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregor XIII (hence why it's called the Gregorian Calendar.) The calendar sets year zero as the day Jesus Christ was born, and every year before that goes in reverse like negative numbers towards zero.

This is idiotic for three reasons:

1. Not everyone follows Christianity

Okay, sure, the majority of people in the world are followers of Christianity but there are still considerable Muslim and Hindu populations throughout the world. One might ask; "why don't they use their own calendars if they don't like ours?" And actually, they do use their own calendars, but their calendars are nowhere near as widely used as the Gregorian calendar is. And even if they choose to use their own calendars, they will have to use them privately because all official documents still require the use of the Gregorian calendar for dates. I don't have an issue with how widespread this calendar is, I have an issue with the calendar itself. Instead of creating our own separate calendars, why not create a uniform calendar that works for us all?

2. It's hella confusing

Seriously. Like it's ridiculously idiotic and unnecessarily confusing. Why is year zero the day Jesus Christ was born? (I already know the answer, it's because it was a Catholic calendar made by a Catholic pope so what other day would it be) So why do we prescribe to a calendar that doesn't represent all of us?

The issue with creating a year zero is that now you make everything before it "negative" in a sense because it is approaching zero. That makes dates before year zero unnecessarily confusing. Just think back to how many times you were confused in history class because an individual was born in 450 BC and died in 300 BC. By creating a calendar like this, you essentially have to learn and understand negative numbers and how they work to understand any date before year zero. Try making little children understand this concept. Even when I was in 4th-grade history, my classmates and I would struggle with this perplexing time scale.

3. It minimizes and underestimates the events before Christ

Think about how much history happened before Christ. Here are some examples of major historical events that happened before Christ:

1. 10,000 BCE: Our first ancestors crossed a land bridge to what is now North America

2. 3700 BCE: Ancient Mesopotamia (Fertile Crescent) and the beginnings of agriculture and domestication

3. 3150 BCE: Ancient Egypt and the pyramids

4. 900 BCE: Ancient Greeks and the flourishing of art, literature, math, and theater

5. 800 BCE: Ancient Roman Empire

6. 295 BCE: Imperial China

And the list could go on and on. Just look at how far we've come, from being hunter-gatherers and scouring the Earth for food, to literally having mass empires that span entire continents and domesticating crops and animals. We went from being prey to being predators. But this is all just shoved back to before Christ. Setting the birth of Christ as year zero makes everything before zero insignificant because it, in a way, establishes the idea that zero is a starting point and everything starts after the birth of Christ, right? It alludes to the idea that nothing worthwhile happened before Christ because everything important in our history started after.

I hate this mentality because as anyone can see from the examples above, that is simply not the case. So much of our amazing history is overlooked because it's shoved behind the starting point for human history. This also makes it hard to understand the continuity of time because instead of it being a simple scale of ascension from year zero to now, it's negative towards zero and then positive.

So, what do we do now? Isn't it too late to change our calendar now? I mean, it would be nearly impossible to have the entire world shift to a different calendar.

A YouTube channel by the name of "kurzgesagt" has made a video on the issues of the Gregorian calendar, espousing the same complaints as mine. You can watch their highly informative and well-done video here.

They propose a new calendar with a different year zero. Instead of setting year zero as the birth of Christ, they propose setting year zero to about 12,000 years ago, a time when ancient Anatolians built humanity's first building. It was a temple, and still to this day historians have not been able to figure out how it was built. If we set this date as year zero, everything would be easier and simpler. Year zero would be the date mentioned previously, and events would progress from there. It would emphasize all periods in history rather than underestimating them like the Gregorian calendar, and it would get rid of the ridiculous concept of negative numbers towards zero. In this new calendar, we would be in year 12,017.

With the new calendar, it's amazing to realize how long we've occupied this earth. 12,000 years ago we were building temples, and we had been on earth thousands of years before that as well. It certainly sounds more important than 2017, which inherently indicates that we've really only been making considerable progress on earth for 2,017 years (which is bonkers.)

The only issue with this calendar is setting a year zero. "Kurzegesagt" sets year zero to be 12,000 years ago when the first building was constructed, but it's arguable that this should be the year zero. If we are to set a year zero for our calendar that marked the beginning of our history and was the origin of our existence, what would it be?

This would be a controversial and contentious issue that would lead to many historians debating what year zero would be. Should it be the year humans were able to use and control fire? Or the year we became homo sapiens? Or maybe, the year we began farming and domesticating? How about when we started using and creating stone tools?

This is a very open question with many answers. So, I'll leave you with that. One day, if we could come to agreement on a year zero for our human history, we could potentially have a universal calendar that encompasses all of us. A calendar that truly underscores our complex and prolific history.

If you were to make a calendar for human history, what would you set year zero to?

"Kurzegesagt" also made an actual calendar using their year zero, and besides all this, they make amazingly animated and informative videos that leave you questioning everything. You can subscribe to them or check out their channel here.