My Annual Complaint about “Springing Ahead”

Today I woke up at 7:45 am and realized that it was really 8:45 am. It was cloudy (that’s fairly standard for March in Central NY), and so if the sun was well risen, I couldn’t tell. While I’d been thinking how virtuous I was, getting up so early on a Sunday, my self-congratulatory attitude soon turned to guilt: I hadn’t gotten up early; in fact I was up rather late. How could an hour difference make such a difference? I hurried downstairs and turned on my Happy Light and worried about getting up tomorrow.

Sunrise was at 6:39 am yesterday morning; it was 7:39 am this morning. I’d been feeling better—the darkness that plagues mornings in Central NY was lifting; my mornings were now less often spent in darkness than when the semester started in January—but the darkness was returning.

Immanuel Kant claims that time is not a quality of things in themselves, but it is necessary for our thinking about our own thinking and as a precondition for sensing objects. Time is the form that our thinking takes: we understand events in terms of time (simultaneous, present, past, future) but time is not itself something we have sensory evidence of; we impose a structure that involves time and space on our sensory evidence. Causes must precede effects; some of our sensory impressions are given to us now, some in the past; our predictions about the future depend on assumptions about time. And our understanding of changes in how we keep time is a way of understanding the past, present, and future—an exercise in history, not necessarily one in physics.

Heidegger claims that the physicist’s interest in time is in measurement, but the concern about time is, for philosophy, a concern about human being (in Heidegger’s terminology, Dasein). Humans think about the measurement of time, of course, but also about the fact that we live in time; we swim in it the way fish swim in water.

In A Brief History of Time Keeping, Chad Orzel claims that philosophical discussions of time are “deep”, but the history of time-keeping is a history that shows us how the discussion of temporality and human being is tied up with the ideas of technological and scientific progress: “the dawn of global telecommunications and rapid travel pushed us toward a more malleable, conventional picture of time defined in ways that make life easier.” Daylight Savings Time, Orzel says, is purely a matter of convention: “DST was created and continues to this day because it serves political and social ends.” He cites the small reduction in energy use during the summer months as one of these, and traces the change back to a proposal to an Act of Congress in 1918 to “preserve daylight and provide standard time for the US.” The idea, Orzel says, was that this was a wartime measure to conserve energy; it was intermittently observed by different states and regions until 1966, when the Uniform Time Act required statewide observation of DST. Some states were able to opt out, subject to the approval of the US federal government; Arizona and Hawaii did so. The residents of the other 50 states change their clocks twice a year.

When I complained about the time change back in March 2024 to one of my classes, a student objected that she loved this time change, since sunset came an hour later. Another student tried to console me: “Don’t worry. This should be the last year we do this. Supposedly, we won’t be turning the clocks back in the fall.”

This did not make me happy.

Orzel says that a change like the one my student hoped for was tried in 1974 in the US, and abandoned: “As much as people grumble about the time changes, they like getting up before the sun rises even less,” he says. Orzel’s own proposal (half-joking, he says) is that we should fall back in November, then move the clocks forward by 5 minutes every Saturday starting at the end of December until mid-March—basically moving clocks forward an hour in 12 5-minute increments. “This would give us late summer sunsets, early winter sunrises, and an extra hour of sleep one weekend each fall, but avoid the disruption of jumping forward an hour in the spring.”

My proposal? How about if we “spring forward” in late March (as we used to?) The sunset advocates would have to wait a couple more weeks for their sunny evenings. A small price to pay, in my grumpy opinion, to keep us contrarians from grumbling so much.

So we turn the clocks back and forward, adjusting our clocks (those of us who still use them), and remembering days in the past, hoping for sunny evenings, and trying to get up in the dark.