Saving Daylight

I’ve woken up around 8 AM the last two days which is later than usual for me. I no longer have to be somewhere at a certain time so I don’t have to set an alarm. I blame moving the clocks forward since I’ve tended to wake up right around sunrise and now sunrise is an hour later.

I blew through my sleep goal but still got a high score on my sleep tracker so I guess that means something. I took it to mean my body needed more rest so I’ve been taking it easy today since I have a lesson tonight (another schedule shift). I’m not really sure there is a benefit to having something log my sleep and score it every night. Like I need something else to be judged and then you feel like a failure at sleep when you get a low score which is something that happens to me quite frequently.

But that’s not the main topic for today. We have to talk about the silliness of changing the clocks twice a year for no real good reason. Whoever came up with the whole “Daylight Savings” was some kind of marketing genius. We don’t “save” anything. You get the same amount of daylight so all it really does is change your perception of it. “Wow it sure stays lighter later, glad we are saving daylight”.

I can’t say for sure but I remember the Germans at work used to say “Summer Time” which is a better description except that now we start in March and end in November so we cover much more than summer. Maybe we should just call what we are in now “Normal Time” since it takes up most of the year and then say we switch to “Winter Time” for the few short months when time is what time was supposed to be.

If I dug deeply, I’d probably see this as another example of human arrogance. Look at us, we can cheat nature and get an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Except you aren’t getting an extra hour. You aren’t cheating anything. I guess I see the benefit in the middle of summer when, around here, sunrise is around 6:15 AM. Without the switch it would be 5:15 AM and who’s going to be up to take advantage of that?

Of the three clocks we have, two automatically reset (just like phones and computers) so that’s a plus. But we do have five other things that have clocks that need to be reset. One of them is a microwave downstairs and I always forget about that and my wife doesn’t change clocks so that one may stay on the old time for a bit. I’ll change it when I look at it and wonder why the time is off.

In the end, it isn’t really a big deal to adjust a few clocks so it isn’t worth getting worked up about (although I know some who do). I just object to the faulty logic in thinking that we are actually “saving” daylight.

Now, I hear our wonderful politicians want to go to daylight savings time all year. If that happens, it means we’ll never get the hour back that they took from us this weekend. I feel like that would create some kind of time distortion but maybe not. Of course, if they do it, then in a couple of years, someone will probably suggest we again shift clocks forward only now we’ll be two hours off of “old time”.