It is that time of the year again! We have to change our time to save daylight. Save daylight? All I see is the clocks I need to adjust and the hour of sleep between 2:00 and 3:00 AM that just disappears into thin air! When traveling the change in time has never been a big deal for me. Even the red eyes flight from west to east while skipping many hours of the night is something I recover from in just one day.
But this is different. Different because I actually disagree with it existing at all. I am a quiet person, but this time shift twice a year makes me rebellious. The fact there are only a bunch of contradictory reasons on why we should keep on doing this is mind blowing, for me at least. There is some hope though. The European parliament voted to re-evaluate DST recently. There are several arguments in favor or against keeping DST, but I feel that even if there is some sound research going to be done on the effects of DST, there will be a lot of influence by lobbyists that are protecting anything that is making profit on this phenomena.
But the world is changing and people are increasingly becoming more critical of things that are imposed onto them as more and more it becomes clear that the interests served are often profit related and are not considering social factors or people's wellbeing. I also believe that there is ignorance too combined with the resistance to simply change patterns just because we have been doing it for ever.
Anyway, although yesterday, the first day after the clock moved ahead one hour, I felt OK, today I was tired and felt our of sync with my working hours, lunch time and the fact the sun was shining high in the sky while biking home. Not to mention that this morning I had to turn on the lights on my bike. I was so happy that days became longer and finally the morning routine could be done in daylight... until today, where we are set back one hour! Yes, there is more light in the evening, but that does not change my routine nor my sores.
Like twice a year I will get over it but still, this 1 hour of difference feels much harder to get used to than the 5 to 8 hours after an intercontinental flight. Just because I am in my day to day routines and something is disrupting this by brutally subtracting or adding one hour. And yes, I am kind of pissed about it because to me it does not make sense and that is frustrating. I'll take a deep breath, forgive myself for having allowed myself to get frustrated in the first place and by writing this blog post I am contributing to the discussion and awareness on the topic, causing some extra ripples.