Spring forward!
That certainly sounds better than “lose an hour of sleep night!”
Yes, that annual ritual known as Daylight Saving Time is upon us, where overnight it is darker in the morning and lighter in the evening.
So why, exactly, are we doing this?
It turns out that DST was created in the United States in 1918 to conserve energy during World War I, reducing the need for lighting in homes and saving fuel. Germany had introduced the concept a couple of years earlier.
After the war, we went back to regular time, until the 1940s during World War II, when it had the catchy name of War Time. Again, it was abandoned after the war.
Contrary to myth, it was not adopted for farmers, who actually protested its implementation because it disrupted their schedules that were set by the sun, not government dictates. Cows, for instance, looked askance at being milked at a different time in the morning just because a mechanical clock said so.
DST was finally reimplemented with the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which also standardized time zones in the nation. Two states opted out of DST, Arizona and Hawaii, the former because it’s too hot and the latter because it’s out in the middle of the ocean where they practice island time.
Interestingly, Ben Franklin proposed the concept in the 18th century, noting that waking up closer to sunrise gave him more hours of sunlight to illuminate his home, thus cutting back on all those costly candle purchases and no doubt giving him the bright idea about a penny saved is a penny earned.
Today, expert whiners say moving time around disrupts the body’s circadian rhythms (as opposed to cicadian rhythms, which are generally every 17 years and only apply to insects), and can impact physical and mental well-being, causing sleep issues and leaving people groggy, worn out and less alert. Of course, they say that about drinking alcohol …
But as far as the origins of this time-shifting stuff, there are alternate theories, or “facts,” if you will (and what we in the writing business refer to technically as “making shit up.”)
You can’t tell me that back in the pagan times there weren’t some smug puritan types who figured that people were having way too much fun, if you catch my drift, during those spring fertility festivals and decided that cutting the night short by an hour would curtail some of those frolicsome nocturnal activities.
If you think about it, manipulating time is actually pretty common. We add a day in February every four years to even out the calendar, which just goes to show that whoever was making up calendars had obviously been drinking a bit too much mead or whatever it was they drank back in the day.
More recently, there have been efforts to eliminate or make permanent DSL so that we aren’t jumping back and forth in time every spring and fall. But any such change requires an act of Congress, which currently only exists in an existential sense somewhere between time and space.
Then there are the time zones. Anyone who has strayed too far east or west suddenly finds themselves in a completely different time, just so we can all have a fairly common understanding of the time of day corresponding to where the sun is. But why? Seasons don’t always correspond to time: In February it’s summer in Australia and South America and everywhere south of the equator.
There’s actually a standardized world time, Greenwich Mean Time, so why can’t we just use that? Sure, some of us will have to get used to the idea that 3 o’clock in the afternoon is actually mid-morning, or the sun doesn’t set until 1 in the morning, but is that any worse than the rather fluid system of time we use now?
Besides, time is what you make of it. I say live by your own clock. Take charge of your own time. Live in the moment.
And remember, the important thing is it’s five o’clock somewhere.