Daylight Saving Time: Cui Bono?
I’m no fan of arbitrary adjustments to time, but I’m actually somewhat more ambivalent about Daylight Saving Time (note: “saving,” not “savings”) than a lot of people I know. But I should probably rewind a bit.
I’m an insomniac. Anything that messes with my ability to get enough sleep is unwelcome in my life. Changing the clocks by an hour twice a year always messed me up pretty badly, to the extent that I’d sometimes even fall asleep at work during the first week of DST. For the same reasons, I’m pretty badly affected by jet lag, and whenever I travel across time zones I now try to prepare a few days early so I’m already better-adjusted to the new time before I even arrive.
So a few years ago when DST started I tried something new: I didn’t reset my clocks. I’d been going through a rough stretch with the insomnia and it was just One More Thing to deal with, and I announced to my manager at work that I was probably just going to be late for a week, since the alternative was worse.
A curious thing started that week, though: I had quit using an alarm the week before in an attempt to reset my body clock, and I kept not using it that week. I slowly came into line with the rest of the world, and I never turned the alarm back on. And for the most part, years later, I still haven’t turned the alarm on for daily use.
My sleep cycles are more regular without an alarm clock than they ever were with one. I now have a so-called “dawn simulator,” an alarm clock that uses light instead of noise, and I use it when I have to get up earlier than usual (for me), but my mornings are almost entirely free of wretched beeping. Not everybody can go without an alarm, but it has worked better for me than any other single approach to sleep regulation.
Anyway, back to Daylight Saving: by common practice and law, we all agree to set our clocks forward by an hour in the Spring and set them back an hour in the Fall. What this means for the alarm users among us is a lost hour of sleep and several days of, well, jet lag. What happens when you’re jet lagged? Your reactions are slower, your mind is fuzzier, you’re a little bit clumsier, and you probably have more coffee than usual in an effort to perk up. This is supposed to save energy, but it turns out that the difference is within the margin of error, and all the best guesses were estimated anyway. So if we’re not actually saving energy, why are we losing sleep over it?
Who benefits?
It’s helpful to look at Daylight Saving Time for what it is: a shift of an hour of morning sun to an hour of evening sun. What is that good for, exactly? It’s not good for driving, it turns out, since evidence seems to indicate that there are more accidents in morning rush hour (and at work) that first week of DST. It’s not good for power usage, because in early Spring everybody cranks the heat for an extra hour in the morning, and in the height of Summer everybody gets home from work and cranks the A/C. Any savings in lighting costs are completely offset too, with the total number of hours of electric light the same regardless of whether they’re in the morning or the evening.
What DST does is make summer evenings longer. What happens during summer evenings? Shopping, barbecues, and sports. One of the biggest proponents of DST is the retail sector, as people apparently shop more during sunny Summer evenings than dark Winter ones. Longer evenings are also great for barbecues, since you have daylight after work to come home, fire up the grill, and eat while the sun sets. So I’m willing to bet the entire industry that exists to supply those barbecues (cattle ranchers and beef packagers, tomato, corn, and watermelon farmers, the charcoal and gas industries, and so on) probably have lobbyists here in Washington just to make sure nobody in congress gets any ideas about changing anything. The other big beneficiary of long evenings?
Baseball.
Think about it. You get off work, you go sit outside in a ballpark somewhere, and watch the sunset behind the bleachers as nothing happens for the better part of three hours. (Note: I’m not saying that nothing happens in baseball, I’m just saying that most of the time that passes during a baseball game passes without anything happening.) Baseball games that start in complete darkness just aren’t the same as the ones that start while the sun still shines. Even if the game ends under lights, it’s a better experience when it starts in daylight.
So when somebody says they love Daylight Saving Time, find out if they also love baseball (or maybe golf, for that matter). I’m willing to bet they do. If they say they hate Daylight Saving Time, ask what they do in the morning. People who already get up early do so for a reason, and messing with morning sunlight makes those people angry. Insomniacs like me probably hate losing an hour of sleep, but we also don’t mind having other people awake and active when we are, so it ends up being a wash.
I like my barbecues, but don’t expect me to show up anywhere any morning during the first week of DST.
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