We Should Call it Daylight Spending Time

by Sharon Kayne

Today is, officially, my least favorite day of the year. It’s the day when we all set our clocks forward one hour for no apparent reason. I don’t actually know anyone who likes changing their clock and screwing up their eating and sleeping schedules—at least not anyone who admits it. I also don’t know anyone who hates Daylight Saving Time as much as I do. Most people are mildly annoyed by it. I, on the other hand, despise it with every fiber of my being. I see it as dastardly government overreach that we should all revolt against.

I don’t generally have a problem with government rules because most of them are backed by practical reasons and promote the public good. The whole thing about murder being illegal, for example. And everyone following the same traffic laws and paying taxes so we can have nice public facilities like schools, highways, sewar systems, and air traffic control. I totally get that and I follow government laws to the best of my ability. But I resent that the government tells me, twice a year, to change my clocks when I know there is absolutely no good reason to do it.

Oh sure, more than a hundred years ago, when DST was first introduced, there was a good reason for it. It was a wartime measure enacted to save energy—which, in turn, saved people money. Now, I would hazard that DST actually costs people money. You see, the biggest proponent of the annual change to DST is the retail lobby. They know people are more likely to go shopping while the sun is still up, so that “extra” hour of sunshine is profitable for them. So, yes, you will lose an hour of sleep tomorrow morning and feel like crap all week—or however long it takes you to adjust to the change—to make American retailers even richer. Isn’t that nice of you?

The perk for you? You’ll have an “extra” hour of daylight to drive to a retailer and buy cheap, plastic crap that you probably don’t need and that will eventually end up in a landfill and/or ocean to further pollute our planet. Yay!

But that’s not the only way in which DST is costly. When on DST, the daily temperature maxes out at about 5pm. That means we are choosing the absolutely hottest time of the day to exit work and get into our sunbaked cars to fight traffic, all while desperately hoping our vehicular ACs will cool us down before we faint from heat exhaustion. On Standard Time, the daily temperature peaks at about 4pm, so the summer heat has already begun to dissipate by the time we leave work and, by the time we’ve reached home, our houses have also had a chance to begin cooling down.

The hotter our summers get, the more DST will cost us, so I recommend we start calling it Daylight Spending Time. That might make it slightly less popular with people (but at least we could still use the “DST” acronym).

The brutal truth is that I hate DST because I grew up in Arizona—one of the few states that embraces sanity by adhering to Standard Time year-round. Moving to New Mexico and suddenly having to change my clocks like a dazed denizen of a Brave New World was a shock for me and I’ve never gotten used to it. When you live someplace as hot as Phoenix, sunset is a blessed reprieve from the stifling heat given off by our blazing solar disc. When I lived in Arizona, the summer sun simply could not set too early for me.

I mean, the days naturally get longer as we move into the summer months anyway. Longer days mean more heat and more heat means more sweat, more thirst, and more time spent looking for the sweet reprieve of shade (or the even sweeter reprieve of air conditioning). Summer days are already longer enough. Why does anyone want to change the clock to make them even longer? Thanks to DST, it’ll still be light at 9pm during the peak of summer, and that’s just wrong. There are people who go to bed at 9pm, for heaven’s sake. It should be dark by then.

As the nation’s summers grow ever warmer, earlier sunsets should gain appeal elsewhere too. Or, as I suggest, we could start referring to the time change as Daylight Spending Time. That might help kill it.

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