I was a bit miffed at losing an hour of my life a couple nights ago when we switched over to Daylight Saving Time. Sure, I was given a free hour a few months ago when we went off it, but I wasn’t thinking much about this balance first thing Sunday morning. I was just thinking that I had woken up to a surprisingly dim 8:30 am and that I didn’t feel as well-rested as I should have for sleeping in until then.
DST always amuses me insofar as we talk about it like we’re altering reality itself. “Oh, we’re losing an hour tonight,” we say. “Oh, we get an extra hour tonight.” Of course we all know that time itself is a natural phenomenon that doesn’t change one bit. It’s only our convention of measuring it that changes. And yet all of us, like I did one paragraph ago, talk like time is genuinely being added to or subtracted from our lives.
It points up our obvious dependence on timekeeping. DST was first implemented because it was felt that the early sunrises of summer were being wasted. So, shift one hour from the morning to the evening, and now more daylight time can be used. To someone living in a society without timekeeping, this would sound preposterous. The idea of the sunrise coming “earlier” would make no sense to him. Rather, it’s just that the night gets shorter. The sun makes its own time.
But to us, the sunrise does come earlier. We organize our entire lives around clocks, and we’re not going to change our standard bedtimes and waketimes because of anything the sun is doing. The workday starts at 8:00 whether it’s been light at that point for hours or for minutes. If DST wasn’t used, you could still independently maximize your summer daylight hours by getting up with the sun at 5:00, but the entire clock-based infrastructure of modern life would be well behind you. You would be pretty limited in how you could use that extra daylight. It’s easier if everyone just agrees to pretend for a while that the sunrise is happening closer to the beginning of our workday.
So from that perspective, DST makes sense. It’s the same as if we all decided to get up one hour earlier. Nothing so crazy about that. And yet most of us still regard the biannual clock-shift as a nuisance. If you use any timepiece that isn’t connected to the infowebs you have to remember to change it, the shift fucks up your sleep, you feel like some part of your life is out of your control.
I think we all innately know we should be living our lives in rhythm with the sun. Waking by alarm in the dark is painful. Our bodies sense that the time on the clock is arbitrary. Living by the sun is no longer an option, though, unless you want to be an unemployed eccentric. You might be friendless, too. Ever try making plans with someone to meet for lunch “when the sun is at its zenith?” It doesn’t work so well.
It’s for basically this reason that Daniel Boorstin (in The Discoverers) says the clock is one of the most important innovations of human history. Before human societies had accurate timekeeping conventions, it was impossible to make good appointments. You might tell someone to visit you when the shadows were such-and-such length, but with such imprecise measures you might be waiting for your guest for a long time. Only when people had precise, mutually agreed-upon metrics could they make efficient use of the day.
Once this was the case, business flourished. A medicine man (or whatever) could pack in twice as many patients since he wouldn’t have to wait for anyone’s interpretation of the angle of the sun to match his own. That’s a contrived example, but you get the point. Imagine trying to get anything done (with other people, that is, and people not living in close quarters with you) without resorting to specified hours and minutes. You could still accomplish useful things, but much time would end up wasted.
It’s likely that clocks (that is, of the non-sundial variety) crept into human societies at a fairly slow rate. But imagine if they exploded onto the scene the way things like smartphones do today. In five years, they go from being nowhere to being everywhere.
If this was how it happened, I’d guess the people to first use clocks would see them as the most liberating thing ever. They would suddenly be able to do so much more. It would be like a veil had been lifted from their eyes. Maybe they even felt this way despite the slow introduction of the clock. I’m sure the tinkerers developing early timepieces saw the many possibilities their work would open up, much like technology developers today.
But cut now to the present. I don’t think many of us feel liberated by our clock-centered culture or excited by our ability to schedule the day. If anything, people complain of being over-scheduled. Living by the clock means dealing with unnatural, government-mandated time shifts twice a year. It means feeling stressed and guilty for being late. It rarely feels like fun.
Clocks do allow us to organize ourselves to do great things, and we wouldn’t have many of modern society’s achievements without them, but I think most of us on a personal level would feel more liberated by a return to clock-free, sun-based living.
It goes to show how often the things that at first seem to free us end up enslaving us. Take email, for example. It went from being a free and instant way of sending a letter (wow!) to being a nightmarish chore that some people spend their entire damn workday wading through.
Humans are by nature competitive, so we try to wring everything that we can out of new technology. Some of these technologies (like clocks and the internet) entail major shifts in how people live. So as users compete to wring more use out of a technology, life becomes warped around the technology to the point that we feel it’s using us rather than the other way around. What was once beneficial is now just burdensome. But maybe that’s nothing to lose sleep over.
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