Let’s face it. None of us is so careful about our sleep habits or health that we should be worrying about the spring-forward doing us in
Happy Daylight Saving Bellyaching Week to all those observing this festival. That’s most of you, I think. This newspaper dutifully prints and reprints as much anti-DST content as it can scrape together every year when it comes time to spring forward, and popular agitation against the changing of clocks is continuous wherever the law insists upon it. Where it doesn’t, as in most of Saskatchewan, the people congratulate themselves endlessly on their superior rationality.
Well, if each man had his own clock, no one would need one. But daylight saving obviously is something of a holdover from the obnoxious 20th-century Zeitgeist of thoughtless progressive regimentation and neurotic modernist orderliness. The original justification for daylight saving was to conserve energy, but it was only an informed guess that it would work, and even if the guess was right, it was made in a world without universal central heating, air conditioning or LED lighting.
In other words, clocks serve a lot of different purposes and we should be careful about screwing around with them according to any one master criterion. If you think that daylight saving is a mess, it is because we already changed the way we use clocks to serve one overriding purpose — energy conservation — that seemed important at the time. Nowadays increasing attention is being devoted to the idea that the clock change might have negative health consequences.
The papers also often say “Ah, we didn’t find a significant overall effect on heart health, but we did find an effect for myocardial infarctions of type D, or among people already on medication E, or on one or the other of the sexes.” Such authors are always ready with a theoretical pretext for whatever subgroup their fishing expedition reeled in. The effects are never enormous and never at a slam-dunk level of statistical significance.
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