💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › dst captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:08:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

It might as well be winter all year long

Daylight Saving Time means you want noon to be 1pm and midnight to be 1am.

That’s wack as far as I’m concerned.

The purp of changing the clock twice a year was this:

In the summertime, it’s bright in the morning regardless, so we might as well have one more bright hour in the evening.
In the wintertime, it’s dark in the evening regardless, so we might as well have one more bright hour in the morning.

Now, there is a normal, polite, kind, reasonable way to do that, if you absolutely have to: change your own (or your office’s) schedule.

We’ve had DST all my life and I’ve railed against it for more than half that, for 25 years. Only a few years ago I found out that its implementation here is basically not much older that my own self. I thought it was from like the thirties or something.

It’s weird that introducing it was even allowed. “Hi, we declare that blue is red and red is blue for three months a year”, or, “we’re gonna say that 2+2=5 in December, to make that holiday money last”.

But it’s not out of some “A is A”–type principle that I hate DST. It’s because changing the actual clock for everyone twice a year is bad for mental health, traffic safety, heart and artery health, mood disorders etc.

Where I live, we have normal time for five months and DST for seven months.

Some peeps have suggested to have DST all year round (not to straw doll them too much, but do they mistakenly believe that that means it’ll be bright evenings all year long. “Oh, summertime all year long? Don’t mind if I do!”) That’s less bad than the current sitch of changing the time twice a year, but I’d much rather have normal time all year round.

Midnight and noon at their correct times.

If you want bright evenings, wake up an hour later.

If you want bright mornings, wake up an hour earlier.

Just leave me out of it.

Changing the time twice a year had a purpose, and some drawbacks.

Being one hour off has less of those drawbacks, but no purpose.

Follow up

Nytpu asked:

Why do some people get so frothingly angry about daylight savings time? I understand getting annoyed, but dude[sic], you literally just change the clock an hour, nothing to get all worked up about.

Because we have sleep disorders and it takes us months (for me, around two months usually) to get into a good healthy sleep schedule and then it’s wrecked twice a year.

The wonderful feeling of not having to go through our days in a zombie fog because we are well rested. That feeling is what goes away. Hence the frothing anger.

Also, if my anger level is coming through in text, that means I still need to work on my writing so I can present things more cool-headedly.