Let's Talk About....Daylight Savings Time

OK. Raise your hand if you hate daylight savings time. Yes, I see you. What is up with this arbitrary addition or subtraction of an hour? You know, that nearly nationwide event that messes up your circadian rhythm and your schedule? That spring-ahead-fall-behind anomaly that wreaks havoc around the world?

When I was young enough to notice, my parents told me that Daylight Savings Time means we gain an hour a day in the fall and lose an hour in the spring. That concept really messed me up. How can we gain or lose an hour? Aren't there still 24 hours in a day? Not 23 or 25. That blew my mind then as it does now.

And when asked why we do this, my dad told me farmers need an extra hour of daylight. Hold on. Farmers? An "extra hour?" How is that possible? It took me another year or two to realize that except for the rotation of the earth around the sun, the number of hours of daylight remains about the same from day to day. So I wondered if farmers are on a different schedule. Don't they just get up with the sun and go to bed with the moon?

It seems so simple, so why change everybody's clocks? Do we really need prompting to stay up later or go to bed earlier? And where is the "savings" in "daylight savings?" I later learned that it was implemented during World War I to save energy. Did that really work? Wars don't have a set schedule.

To make it even more confusing, some states don't have Daylight Savings Time (I am looking at you, parts of Arizona and all of Hawaii), so it becomes a math problem when you travel or call your mom.

And remember before the internet, it was so easy to miss the change and show up to church an hour early or late on the Sunday after "the change?" You had to figure it out yourself. Missed flights, missed classes, missed meetings, missed lunch dates, and for what? So that the farmers can stick to a schedule set by a clock and not by nature? Farmers are smart people and probably don't need Congress to dictate when they should get up in the morning.

And we all know that once we are used to daylight savings, or no daylight savings (I am never sure which one we are on), it's so hard to change to the other. Overnight, we have to eat earlier or later, go to bed earlier or later and of course, the dreaded get up earlier or later. And for what? No one actually gains an hour.

If we have learned anything in this life, it is don't mess with Mother Nature or Father Time.