All the ways daylight saving time screws with you
Only a narrow band of people are really that affected by daylight saving. But gosh darn it, we will complain about it loudly every year.
The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn’t understand why more people weren’t appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order to fit their own daily routines.
DST eventually gained widespread appeal (if you can really call it that) in 1916, when it was a useful way to conserve wartime coal—having more daylight hours in the evening meant people used less energy heating their houses. In the next couple of years, many other countries followed suit.
Most countries in Asia and Africa still don’t follow DST, and many nations in the far north of the world don’t bother—their daylight hours shift so much over the course of a year that it’s not worth it.
The whole thing started as a way to save energy, but it’s mostly stuck around (at least in the U.S.) because sporting goods manufacturers and retail stores lobby for it. Americans go out, play more sports, and buy more stuff when there are more daylight hours after school and work.
In fact, studies suggest we don’t really save energy with DST anymore—if we do, it’s by a margin of less than one percent. We also now know that the sudden shift in our internal clocks gives us all kinds of health issues in the days following. Our bodies change radically over the course of a day based on how much light we see and how much sleep we get. Even an hour’s shift in rest time and daylight hours screws everything up slightly. When that effect is shared across the billion-or-so people who have to reckon with DST, you can find some pretty intriguing correlations.
Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/daylight-saving-time-effects-accidents-health#page-2
The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn’t understand why more people weren’t appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order to fit their own daily routines.
DST eventually gained widespread appeal (if you can really call it that) in 1916, when it was a useful way to conserve wartime coal—having more daylight hours in the evening meant people used less energy heating their houses. In the next couple of years, many other countries followed suit.
Most countries in Asia and Africa still don’t follow DST, and many nations in the far north of the world don’t bother—their daylight hours shift so much over the course of a year that it’s not worth it.
The whole thing started as a way to save energy, but it’s mostly stuck around (at least in the U.S.) because sporting goods manufacturers and retail stores lobby for it. Americans go out, play more sports, and buy more stuff when there are more daylight hours after school and work.
In fact, studies suggest we don’t really save energy with DST anymore—if we do, it’s by a margin of less than one percent. We also now know that the sudden shift in our internal clocks gives us all kinds of health issues in the days following. Our bodies change radically over the course of a day based on how much light we see and how much sleep we get. Even an hour’s shift in rest time and daylight hours screws everything up slightly. When that effect is shared across the billion-or-so people who have to reckon with DST, you can find some pretty intriguing correlations.
Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/daylight-saving-time-effects-accidents-health#page-2
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