Man, fuck daylight savings time. I don’t care if this is going up a week removed from the event when I don’t feel as mad about it, but the whole “change your clocks twice a year” thing is bullshit. We should just adopt DST as our always time. I think more people could use the afternoon/evening time in the sun than the morning time, but I recognize that people who actually get up at that time would maybe prefer the sunlight then. Ultimately, I don’t really care which way we go, so long as we just stick with it. I have enough trouble sleeping without needing to suddenly offset my normal sleep schedule by an hour.

I don’t really have anything smart or cleverly critical to say about the process. I’m sure it served an important purpose once, and that lots of people benefited from it in theory. But, like incredibly old politicians, some things need to be replaced because they’re so out of touch with modern life that they’ve become actively harmful.

I could spend an entire post dunking on people, processes, institutions, and systems that I hate, but I don’t think I could burn them anymore than they burn themselves any time they tried to pretend they know what modern life is like. And none of these jokes are as funny as I’d like them to be. I’m just mad we have this arbitrary shift in our clocks that still happens for reasons I can’t fathom despite the fact that changing the time twice yearly literally hurts people.

It’s like wearing a mask. It takes almost no effort to change an established habit and does so much good for everyone around you that it should be a no-brainer (which, turns out, wearing a mask is a partial-brainer). It should be an easy decision for those in power to do more than suggest making a change might be good, but here we are, dinosaurs in charge and almost nothing useful happening in my country. I am incredibly salty about this today.

I mean, sure, getting to sleep an extra hour would be nice, but that’s only because we lost an hour of sleep seven months ago and it’s not like I actually got any more sleep. I was just awake an hour “earlier” than the day before. But not really. I was awake at the same time, we’re just pretending time changed.

I really thought I’d be done with this by now and have moved on to some other topic, but here I am, still sitting in all this salt. One of my pet peeves is clinging to tradition for no reason other than simple tradition. Nothing makes me lose my temper like someone cleaving to a harmful habit because that’s just what they’ve always done. If there’s no real downside to making a change and all we need to do is work out what change to make, then let’s get going. Let’s start the process. It’s not like we’re ever going to make everyone happy. Even if we did some bullshit like break our timezones into thirty-minute zones or split the time difference between DST and non-DST time, at least we’d be done!

I get that the US changing to the metric system would be a huge system shock that lots of places wouldn’t be prepared for or capable of smoothly making such a change, but this is something we have to do annual PR for every year. We have to remind people twice every year that the clocks are going to change. As someone who doesn’t watch live TV shows, listen to the radio, or read a newspaper, I’m pretty insulated from general public service announcements, but even I see the DST reminders, which shows how pervasive they are. People are just blind to them the same way software users stop seeing error notices if you show too many of them.

Think about how much better life would be if we could make even small systemic changes like this one. If we could do something about this, I might actual feel hope that the current system of governance could solve things like economic inequality/exploitation and dismantaling racist systems with no real public benefit like for-profit prisons and most police departments.