I just tweeted about the beginning of “Daylight Saving Time” here in the United States. Our clocks around the house are now in sync with the annual lie of the government telling the populace that they’ll get an extra hour of sunlight if they just set their clocks forward an hour. We’ve all heard the benefits: energy savings (false), the farmers want it (really false), people are more productive (still false).
When Indiana started using Daylight Saving Time in 2005, energy use went up.
The farmers don’t really enjoy Daylight Saving Time because they’d rather be milking Bessie in the morning daylight, not in the lingering darkness of the preceding night.
The thing is, time is an erred human application to nature. Before 1883, noon represented when the sun was at its highest point in the sky on a particular day. That measurement is a pretty close representation to what our bodies are trying achieve – stay in sync with the natural rhythm of the planet and the solar system. But humans, American humans in particular, are hell bent on bending nature to their whims and trying very hard to fight the system all in the name of having “more” sunlight. There isn’t more sunlight. We are going to get the same amount of sunlight whether we state that solar noon is 11 a.m., 12 noon or 6 p.m. It’s how we use our time that matters. Perhaps if we all just slowed down a little bit, didn’t try to cram 30 hours of activities into 24 hours and stopped dinking around with the clocks, we’d be less hostile and cranky.
We need to stop pretending (thank you Séan for calling it what it is, Pretend Time).
