And, somewhere in our brain, we probably have just such a periodic event generator, although it's probably a bit flawed in the implementation like most things generated by evolution typically are, but it does the job well enough for us to arrive at a sense of time that very roughly agrees with more rigorously-derived measurement devices.
Ultimately time is a shorthand for cause and effect, and the fact that causes propagate to their effects at roughly the same speed (relative to a reference cause and effect) everywhere we measure them (relativistic effects notwithstanding). If you have evidence this is not the case, I would love to see it, because it implies some new physics. You would win a Nobel prize for this, easily, if you could prove it.