I didn’t always hate Daylight Saving Time.
Until I graduated from college, all I knew about Daylight Saving Time was that from March to November, I could watch The Daily Show on school nights, and that if I wanted to record a John Cusack movie on TBS, I had to turn the DVR back an hour.
That’s because Indiana didn’t start observing DST until 2006, so for the blissful first half of my life, Daylight Saving Time really had nothing to do with me. I’m not even sure I thought it was real. Sure, there was that one Seinfeld episode, and sure, it had a miniscule effect on my cable viewing habits, but for the most part it seemed that, like winning the Pepsi Lear Jet or getting a tan, Daylight Saving Time was something that happened to other people.
Even in the run-up to March of 2006, I didn’t believe we were actually going to do it. The night before we changed the clocks, I remember watching the local news until I fell asleep just to make sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. When I finally did adjust my alarm, I kept expecting a nonexistent roommate or Ashton Kutcher to crash through the ceiling tiles and tell me it was all a big, hilarious joke.
No one changes their clocks, you idiot! The solar constant is not subject to the whims of humans! PUNK’D!
It wasn’t hilarious, though.
That year I had just staggered out of my first February as a teacher. I was pallid, malnourished, and teaching standardized test prep. All that was keeping me from tunneling out of my classroom that March was the faint glow of sunlight that was just beginning to seep into my morning drives again.
I suppose I understood in my logical mind that Daylight Saving Time was going to take my sunshine away. But until that Monday morning arrived, I did not understand it in my soul.
Reducing your morning sunlight exposure, JUST AS IT IS STARTING TO COME BACK AFTER A DESPERATE INDIANA WINTER, is a psychological punch in the kidneys. Morning sunlight is critical to good sleep, mental equilibrium, and feeling more like a human than a cog in the American capitalist machine, and I will never forget the feeling of utter despair on that first day of DST, when I realized my morning droplet of solar nourishment was gone.
Nor do I have to forget, because now I get to feel it anew. Every. Single. Year.
Look, I don’t have to lay out all the reasons for you that DST is objectively stupid. You can read what sleep scientists say. You can watch what the astrophysicist says. You can look at the car crash statistics or the heart attack statistics or the energy use statistics. You can consider that DST is “saving” daylight in the same way my children’s allowance is saving me money on Beanie Boos: it isn’t. It’s just shifting around the exact same number of resources to make us feel like we’re accomplishing something.
None of this is news, and I know no actual human person is in love with Daylight Saving Time.
I have discovered, however, that many people are comfortable with it. In the face of my righteous DST indignation, Ohio and Michigan friends have mostly sighed, peered over their tiny rectangle eyeglasses, and said, “This is just the way it is. Get over it.”
I believe this is where we Hoosiers have more to offer you than basketball and giant pieces of breaded pork. We offer a lack of complacency.
Our outrage is intense because we didn’t grow up with the long con of “saving” our daylight. The rest of you have had forty years to make your peace with this, and I can tell you I’ll need not a day less. It’s been a mere fifteen for me, and my pretzels will be just as salted this Sunday as they were the first day of this temporal madness.
But I think that’s a good thing.
To me, the DST conversation is really about status quo bias—the very normal but very uninspiring belief that if we’ve always done something a certain way, then that’s the way it should continue.
If you’ve ever been the new person in an organization, or a different person in an organization, someone with life experiences markedly different from those around you, you know what it’s like to hit status quo bias. It’s a wall labeled This is How We’ve Always Done It, and it’s decorated with the indentations of every divergent thinking person’s forehead that has ever banged against it.
It’s hard to change people’s minds once they’ve gotten used to something, and to be fair, sometimes the way we’ve always done it turns out to be the best way. I didn’t spend fourteen years teaching middle school to come here and tell you seating charts don’t work. However, anything that’s worth keeping is worth examining, and that’s the value that new and different people bring—they see things with fresh eyes.
If you’re that person right now, I feel you. I know you feel like you’re shouting on an island and that your friends are telling you to just eat a slice of sugar cream pie and move on with your life, but don’t let your voice be drowned by custard, no matter how delicious. You have a perspective to offer that they don’t, and that’s probably why the universe put you in this exact position in this exact, sunlight-deprived moment.
Use your voice, support public schools, and Godspeed on Monday, everyone.
