This past weekend, we all set our clocks back an hour. (With “we all” meaning the people who observe US daylight savings time. The EU (and UK, who kept the schedule after Brexit) did it last weekend, too. But did anyone actually physically change a clock? I had to do it for my watch (but I’m the only person I know who wears a watch that isn’t paired to my phone), and then my oven and microwave (but I’ve seen a lot of those clocks in people’s homes just set to 00:00 all the time). I also had to change my car, but a more modern car probably knows what day it is (where as mine does know what time zone I’m in, but not the calendar).
And sure, there’s the whole “why are we still doing this?” which is fair. It was started by the Department of Energy to try to get people to use less electricity by having it be light out later in the evening in the summer so people wouldn’t just have all the lights on in their house (or would just go outside). Nowadays, though, all the light bulbs in my apartment only use like 6 watts (actually, the one in my living room right now is 9… such an energy hog!) and so my power consumption is driven mainly by things like my HVAC and appliances. Sure, modern refrigerators are probably pretty efficient, but I’d bet it pulls more than 9 watts. And I don’t turn it off when the sun’s out.
So yeah, maybe we don’t need to do it anymore, but is it really the hassle everyone makes of it? Arguably, it’s less of a headache than it used to be. Your computer and phone get the time from the internet; your calendar just accounts for it (my 3:00 PM meeting today is still at 3:00 PM even though 3:00 PM today is a different UTC time than last Tuesday)… I guess your cat is probably confused when you don’t feed it on time on Sunday morning, but no matter when you feed a cat, it’s not on time.
There’s a broader thing here where I feel like a lot of people are getting their opinions sort of fed to them by popular culture – where people are sort of doing a bit, but then it sticks and they just keep doing it forever. Does anyone actually have a real aversion to the word “moist”, or do they say they hate it to play along with everyone else saying they hate it? Does anyone actually care whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie? (I’m pretty sure that discourse started over people treating Frozen as a Christmas movie, which it is not.)
Anyway, change your clocks, and don’t act like it somehow has turned your life upside-down for weeks. It’s fine.
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