Why are we still doing this?
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I don’t know anyone who likes Daylight Saving Time, especially the “spring forward” version. I allowed myself brief hope a couple years back when the topic was in the air. There seemed to be bipartisan support for dumping the practice. I don’t see any conspiracy crazies who insist that ending DST would somehow serve George Soros and his globalist elites. I thought it might be an easy lift.
And yet, here we are again.
I’m fine this morning. I don’t have a problem waking up an hour early once in awhile. I keep a fairly consistent sleep schedule, thanks to the work of people like Matt Walker, whose book, Why We Sleep, was recommended by badass Amanda Fucking Palmer. (That recommendation came in a Tim Ferriss Podcast interview; Ferriss has since had Walker himself on the podcast in a kind-of two part interview [#650 and #654].)
But tonight, everything will be messed up. My sleep routine won’t work; I won’t be tired when it’s time to go to bed. And as the days go on—too early to fall asleep, up before I’m rested—it will compound. I won’t feel fully human again for at least a week.
Given the increase in traffic accidents around the clock shift, it’s good that I have to drive in the school only a couple times during the week. I’m hoping that grumpiness will be the worst effect I experience (or inflict).
And speaking of the effects of DST, here’s one of the more fascinating things I’ve learned:
In an episode of The Argument (a New York Times podcast), Jane Coaston spoke with a couple professors (one in neuroscience, one in law) about DST. They agreed that the semi-annual springing forward and falling back is bad, but disagreed about which time we should stick to: should we go to permanent standard time (the one we fall back to) or to permanent daylight saving time (the one we spring forward to). The neuroscientist, Joseph Takahashi, argued for the former and, as supporting evidence, included this bizarre tidbit:
there’s a very influential study that came out of the National Cancer Institute that looked at cancer rate by county across the United States. And across our four time zones, there is a gradient in the incidence of all of these cancers that’s significant, where the western border has a higher incidence rate than the eastern border.
These time-zone borders are “completely artificial,” so (I guess) the issue can’t be something about the physical environment. Takahashi suggested that our clocks—our body’s circadian rhythm and the clocks on our wall— are more out of sync at these artificial borders. The conclusion: living on the western border of a time zone is similar to living in daylight saving time, which would put our clocks permanently out of sync.
And since cancer is the second leading cause of death (heart disease is #1)… well, making DST permanent would be bad. It would still be better than going back and forth, but it would not be the best choice—at least, from a cancer perspective. (As the law professor, Dustin Buehler, pointed out, the decision “really is a cost benefit analysis.”)
Fascinating.