Happy Mass Delusion Day! Today is February 29, or as I like to call it: March 1.
You, as well as I do, know it’s really the next month already, but we made a social contract with each other where we all agreed to pretend that February is a different length sometimes. Kind of like pretending that the 13th floor on some buildings is the 14th floor. We all know it’s the 13th floor because the elevator buttons go straight from 12 to 14. But pretending makes us feel better about things.
Why do we do this? Because our calendar sucks. To make ourselves feel better about our flawed calendar, we add a 366th day every four years. Which only means a year isn’t really 365 days, it’s actually 1461 days. But we don’t like that kind of complication. It’s too messy.
But wait, it’s gets messier! We’re taught that we add an extra day every fourth year to account for the fact that Earth, after 365 days, is still 8 hours away from a complete circle around the sun.
What you might not know is that figure is still not accurate. The math is off by enough that every 100 years there is no leap year. Just to balance things out again.
And that’s not even the end of the story. At every fourth 100-year interval, we have to add a leap year back in.
This is probably why the Mayans were always cutting off people’s heads, the calendar-making business drives you insane. Likely, the world won’t end later this year, it’s just when Mayans ran out of heads.