A little rant about time

If you were to ask me what I think is the most annoying thing, my answer would be highly dependent on the current time, day, and what I have been exposed to recently. I am looking at my clocks right now, which show 01:30:52 AM. Yes, I should go to bed, but something is keeping me awake: today we shift to summertime again.

History

Here in germany, we are plagued with this idiocy since 1916… wait wasn’t there a world war at that time? Was that really necessary? Yes, there was. No, it wasn’t. Benjamin Franklin explained the concept in 1784, and 132 years later some genius thought “hey, you know what’s a great idea? messing with the time” because time always followed what us pitiful humans thought up¹.

In recent history Argentinia, Belarus, Namibia, Turkey, and some more had the glorious idea of practically changing timezones by making summertime permanent. What’s worse than some timezones flipping around multiple times a year? Having islands in them that do not and just take time.Now().Add(1*time.Hour). Why use this, if you can also follow the North Korean model of UTC+8:30. Oh, right… because that idea is so bad that even NK took a step back.

Effects of switching

As someone with a dog (who couldn’t care less what the clock is showing), having time shift around me twice a year is a great way to ruin my week (if not the next two weeks) while my body tries to adapt and I have to retrain my dog because coming one hour later to work is not an option.

The only way I’ve found to at least somewhat alleviate this terror is by staying up all night and just crashing completely the next evening (if I can even make it that far). That’s not healthy. Quite the opposite.

Eternal Summer(time)

If you take as much as a glance at the citations listed on Wikipedia, you’ll note a surprising amount of studies and citations about why daylight saving time should not be used. Now, what would happen if you asked some random people from the street whether they prefer “Summertime” or “Wintertime”²? People would answer summertime. Why is that? I am pretty sure that the answer would boil down to: summer = warm & good, winter = cold & bad.

Which in turn would be a great example of people deciding by feels over reals. Some decisions should not be influenced by feelings. Especially not if they may carry a health impact.

Solution to the problem

I’d like to suggest the following solution: Screw daylight saving time. Let’s have the entirety of the EU adopt normal time, instead of sweattime³

And now for a completely wasted sunday. Because nobody is productive or happy if they don’t sleep, in anticipation of a week full of terrible wake ups.

Do you know better? Have a comment? Great! Let me know by sending an email to ~mpldr/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht

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