Permanent Daylight Saving Time: Disconnecting from the sun
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 03/04/2022

Permanent daylight savings time. [...]
I find it very symbolic of the way that we interact with nature. [...]
Someone had a clever idea that we could actually pretend that the time is different than what it is.
We could actually just change the clocks, completely arbitrarily.
The sun isn't changing.
Still doing the same thing.
But when it's actually 12 o'clock, we can pretend it's 1 o'clock.
And the idea being that people don't like to wake up at 5 a.m., and so they're sleeping through all that beautiful sunshine in the summer.
So if we tell them it's 6 a.m., maybe they're more likely to wake up.
Or at least a little bit earlier than they would have.
And at night, people don't like to go to sleep at 9 p.m., most people.
But what if you tell them it's 10 p.m.?
Oh, well, then it seems a little more reasonable.
So the entire idea of daylight savings time is all based on pretending.
Pretending that the time is something different than it is.
So this has been happening for around a century now, and people really get tired of this whole changing the clocks.
It adds a whole new level of complexity, having to change your clocks twice a year.
And then when you're dealing with multiple time zones, dealing with people around the world, it adds a whole new layer of confusion, because the dates of the daylight savings change can be different, and so that causes the time zone different changes to be different, and so it leads to a lot of confusion of dealing with times.
And so for all the clear reasons why nobody likes to do this twice a year clock change, and it seems completely unnecessary, now there is a strong movement to get rid of it.
But then I was surprised to learn that we're not getting rid of it.
They're actually suggesting that we keep it permanently in place, permanent DST.
And the idea, well, maybe we'll get people to use less energy, because they can be out during the sunshine.
And maybe they'll be out later at night and do more shopping or something.
So the arguments for why we should have permanent seem to be pretty dubious.
But the idea is now that we're simply going to pretend permanently that, when the clock says 12, well, it's actually 11 o'clock in the sky.
And so we're actually counting 12 hours from 11 p.m. to 11 a.m., as the sun mostly goes up, and then 12 hours from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., as the sun mostly goes down. [...]
It's one level of disconnection from nature.
And I know it's just a number.
12 o'clock is just a number.
But if we have 12 hours counting up, the sun's going up, 12 hours counting down, the sun's going down, that, in some very, very small way, connects us to the natural environment around us, what's actually happening in the sky.
All the a.m. hours, the sun's going up.
All the p.m. hours, the sun's going down. [...]
And it just gives that very simple bit of connection to what's actually happening in the sky.
But when we pretend that 12 is 1, well, now the sun is actually at its peak at 1 p.m.
And so we sometimes call 12 noon and 12 at night midnight, but now 1 p.m.
would be noon and then 1 a.m.
would be midnight.
So why do we think it's OK to simply pretend what's happening in the sky, simply to declare that nature is something other than it is?
It seems it could be seen as an act of arrogance on the part of human society, of just saying that we can redefine nature to be whatever we want it to be.
Or simply an expression of this disconnection, that it actually doesn't matter.
Because we are so disconnected from the natural environment that it really doesn't matter what time we say it is.
Those electric lights are going to be on, and it's only one hour difference, so why not?
Why not just say it's whatever time we feel like it being?
So once again, very small point, but I feel like it's a sign of how disconnected that we can easily become from nature.
And I wonder what other ways has this been happening, where we've been sort of redefining away nature and sort of pretending that...
we're sort of living in an imaginary world, in a way, where we can define things to be what we want them to be?
And maybe this is actually good, because it's certainly not ideal to be living in a pure state of nature, and it's wonderful to have walls, and roofs, and wonderful systems to live comfortably.
And all that could be argued as being disconnected from nature.
I'm inside a room right now with walls, and a very nice roof which is keeping the snow off.
And that could be seen as being disconnected from nature, but I'm OK with it.
So is this another example of it just being OK to kind of create this imaginary environment for ourselves?
or is this just one little step too far in the direction of moving away from the nature around us?
So I'd be curious to hear what you think about it.

#permanentdst #daylightsavingtime #disconnected