The West Coast Time Warp
“Oh, haven’t you heard? That was ages ago.”
Little known fact: contrary to popular opinion, PST stands not for “Pacific Standard Time”, but “Pretty Slow To Find Out About Everything”
In LA, by the time you’ve woken up , the day has happened everywhere else in the world, the news cycle is over, and your friends in London are either discussing which pub they will be meeting at later, or are already drunk.
I awake every morning to roughly 172 Whatsapp messages, a deluge of junk emails from companies in the UK that haven’t worked out I’m no longer around to buy useless tat from them, and a chain of jokes from various groups of friends that I gamely respond to 4 hours too late.
On New Year’s Eve, the rest of the world was well into their hangovers and had already abandoned their New Year’s Resolutions by the time I limped over the finishing line at midnight.
I am the last to get the joke, the last to hear the news, and the last to know about anything not happening in California. It’s like being a foreign correspondent reporting from some distant conflict zone to a studio anchor over a very bad satellite link, or just a reliably dim-witted friend who gets the punchline hours after everyone else.
In a very short period of time, you are disabused of the idea that anything that happens to you matters to anyone else: after 3pm PST, if I was to message everyone I knew in the UK telling them that I’d been kidnapped and was locked in the boot of a car speeding towards a gristly and certain death, it’s unlikely that anything would be done about it for at least 8 hours.
For some people this might cause the dreaded FOMO, but the Californian TimeWarp has some interesting side-effects:
- Unplugged from the global news cycle and your friends and relatives, it’s very easy to stop worrying about what’s going on anywhere else (and to become a very bad friend). I imagine that CE’s adoring readers in Alaska, The Outer Hebrides and The North Pole share this sense of disassociation with the wider world.
- You discover the appallingly short half-life of ‘big news’ amongst your friends. Someone being pregnant is ‘big news’ for approximately a week, after which it’s just the status quo. If no-one has shared the news with you inside that week, it might never happen unless by accident.
- Californians have made being the last section of the world to go round the sun work in their favour: they’ve invented the future. I may be imagining it, but it’s not hard to see how being geographically and chronologically behind the times gives you no choice but to get ahead of it by using the internet better than anyone else, and then making potloads of cash out of it — hence Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.
- Occasionally it feels like you are living in a joke world being run by an all-powerful but bored child, particularly when you wake up just as the tsunami of 12hrs of internet hysteria breaks over you. When #TheDress went viral, my wife and I spent a bewildering first hour of our day trying to understand why the entire world was debating the colour of a party dress. It’s enough to make anyone fantasize about a retreat back into the dark ages before we had the Internet, or at least consider a long-term move to a mountaintop in Tibet where there’s no mobile signal.
