Body Time and Daylight Savings Apologetics
Unpopular opinion time! Daylight Savings (yes I say “savings”; sue me; but that isn’t the unpopular part) cleverly solves an otherwise utterly intractable coordination problem. Standard business hours are 9 to 5 and even if you’re self-employed you probably are, for example, on an ultimate frisbee team or somesuch that can’t start at 5pm because of the nine-to-fivers on the team. There’s a whole web of interdependent schedules and there is just no way to induce a critical mass of people to shift their activities earlier in the day so as not to waste so much daylight by sleeping in hours past dawn.
UNLESS you resort to the outrageous hack of just literally changing the clocks.
Sure, it makes life a living hell for computer programmers, and the original rationale of saving energy on lighting surely doesn’t apply. (Also I guess it literally kills people, but so do a lot of things that are obviously still worth it. Like ice cream, probably. Cars I don’t know. If they’re worth it, I mean.)
But the upside — more daylight in the evenings — is a big deal. And the idea that people could just choose on their own to wake up earlier when the days start getting longer is all wrong. I mean, yes, you can personally do that, but it does you no good unless everyone else (like the rest of your ultimate frisbee team) does it too. And your frisbee team can’t do it unless all the businesses do it and the businesses can’t do it unless the trains and buses do it and every other sport and club and social group and… Like I said: massive, intractable coordination problem.
I think it’s kind of awesome that we were able to solve the problem at all.
“Ok, fine, permanent daylight savings time then!” says everyone I know. There are two problems with that, one practical and one philosophical. Practically, in much of the northern hemisphere, it means starting the day in pitch darkness in the middle of winter. Philosophically, just like, how absurd is it to permanently change the clocks rather than change standard business hours? My whole argument above is that changing standard business hours earlier and later again every year is untenable. But if the public consensus is “business hours should just always start earlier so we have more daylight after work” then it’s almost tragically hilarious that the best way to achieve that is to permanently redefine time itself rather than tamper with the apparently greater sanctity that is “Nine To Five”. Maybe it’s the Dolly Parton movie by that name that really locked us in there.
(I think ideally I’d love to see a system of referring to times that was relative to sunrise. This is a can of worms though. Or a can full of cans of worms, one of which is how much nerds despise the concept of timezones.)
Body Time
As any computer programmer can attest, off-by-one errors can be dang confusing. At least I’m personally bad enough at mental arithmetic that it’s easy to confuse myself about whether I’ll get tired or wake up an hour earlier or later after the clocks change for daylight savings time.
So I think the right concept handle for this is body time. The clocks fell back last night which means that, relative to the clocks, body time is an hour ahead. If you usually go to sleep at 11pm then at 10pm clock time, it will be 11pm body time. So that’s when you’ll get sleepy. Same thing in the morning. You wake up at your normal body time and clock time is an hour earlier than that.
Body time is +1 hour after falling back in the fall and −1 hour after springing head in the spring.
Easy peasy. And especially helpful if you have children if you want to be like “ok, time for bed, it’s 9pm body time” at 8pm tonight!
One more update. I’m thinking more about the “permanent DST” idea and what the logical extreme of that would be. I think it would mean that whatever time dawn is on summer solstice, that’s what we call “8am”, year round. No sleeping past dawn ever! (Unless you want to; we’re just talking about the standard “when things happen during the day” range, aka business hours.)
Then the downside is that it’s dark till like lunch time in the winter. Maybe that’s ok!
I made a tool to experiment with such questions: dreeves.github.io/daylight
I made this annoying meme after thinking about how most of the anti-DST arguments involve wishful thinking about how we could get the best of all worlds if “everyone would just”. Of course everyone will never just.
I think the following are valid ways to argue against DST:
Estimate the value people get from the additional summer evening daylight. Like what would people collectively pay to hit snooze on the sun setting for an hour during the summer. Then compare that with the many costs, like sleep disruption and software bugs. And of course the lost morning daylight.
Propose a realistic scheme by which business hours could be shifted without changing the clocks.
I think the nay-sayers have a visceral feeling that changing Time is just deeply, fundamentally stupid. Maybe even wrong in a very literal way. Time is what it is. Changing our clocks does nothing but sow confusion. Can everyone not just do what they want to do when they want to do it, regardless of what numbers are displayed on clocks? I think people really can’t. We are social creatures and those numbers are critical infrastructure for our ability to coordinate.
I’m getting into lots of fun arguments since posting this. I think a lot of people are hung up on how they personally aren’t beholden to 9-to-5 so it’s all cost and no benefit to them and they suspect that it’s probably a minority of people who are really beholden to 9-to-5.
I think even if it’s a huge majority of people who are perfectly flexible in when they wake up and how they use the day’s daylight, my argument works. It’s about Schelling points.
Also, to be clearer about my model, in winter we wake up at dawn and use all the daylight—little that there is—efficiently. Then the days lengthen and we keep walking up at the same clock time. So we’re sleeping through a lot of daylight, which is inefficient. We want to shift to starting the day earlier in the summer. Changing TIME ITSELF is the only realistic way to do so.
Note that this only applies to a certain range of latitudes. Closer to the equator the length of the day doesn’t change enough for this to be an issue. And close enough to the poles you either have so much or so little daylight that there’s little room to optimize.
In between those latitudes there’s a pretty huge upside to shifting the standard hours when group activities happen to align with when the sun is shining.
And I’m not saying there aren’t big downsides. Mostly I want the debate to acknowledge the tradeoffs!