I woke up at 4:47 this morning. At least that is what my bedside clock read. According to my phone, the cable box, and the stupid government, it was actually “3:47.”
I went to bed at around 9:30. My body likes to sleep for 7 hours and 15 minutes. I don’t always get that much sleep, of course, but on a plurality of mornings I am most likely to wake up 7 hours and 15 minutes after I went to bed. Often almost to the minute.
In other words, my body knows what time it actually is. For that matter, so does the rooster that lives up the road. And all the animals that live in the woods behind our house, and everywhere else on planet Earth. And the sun and the moon, the tide and stars. Everyone knows what time it is except for government.
My body will spend the next few months knowing it is 4:47 but being told by the government that is “actually 3:47.” I will never get used to this. I never do. I will keep on waking up “too early” according to the clock until March 2024 when we put the clocks back to normal.
Government: The time is what it is for most of the year, but then, for four months, time is no longer what it is…for some reason.
Me: You are evil.
That’s right, I said evil. Messing with people’s perception of time is evil. It’s anti-human. It’s anti-life.
Every year, at this time and again in March, the internet is swarmed with articles debating this issue. As if time should be up for debate.
Some of the articles will—quite rightly—point out the increase in fatal accidents and heart attacks on the Monday following the switch to Saving time. And then government-lovers will predictably respond, “But hey, they decrease in the week after we switch to Standard time. So it balances out.”
It doesn’t exactly balance out, actually, but even if it did, how would that make any of this okay? Are we pawns on a chess board? Rats in a maze?
Nothing makes this okay. Circadian rhythms are essential to health. We have spent the last 500,000 years developing them. Animal life has spent the last 500,000,000 years developing them. What on Earth gives government the right to mess with them?
Answer: Nothing.
Nothing justifies this.
Reality. Time. Biological rhythms established over eons. These things are not up for debate.
But if we adjust the time, the farmers will…
No.
Schoolchildren will…
No.
Energy consumption will…
No. No no no no. There is no excuse messing with human body rhythms.
In fact, there is no excuse for a central authority messing with much of anything at all…
Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of order: emergent order and imposed order.
Emergent order (also called spontaneous order) is an order that arises from the organic aggregation of billions of individual actions. There is no central control.
The English language used to have verb conjugation, but now it does not (other than the vestigial conjugation for 3rd-person-singular). Why?
Because a thousand years ago, speakers of one Germanic root language had to find a way to communicate with speakers of another Germanic root language. The result was a simplified language both could understand.
No one told any of them to do this. The change took place over time as a part of an emergent-order process. The change took place because it served human life.
If a central power had tried to orchestrate the process, they would have screwed it up. Twelve guys conspiring in a room cannot know as much as a million people. Even if they are smarter than average, they will still screw it up. Emergent order aggregates human knowledge and wisdom in ways that cannot be achieved by any cabal.
This is the same reason, by the way, why market economies produce abundance and central planning produces misery and murder. Central planning fails because it works against natural law, rather than with it.
There are times when an imposed order may be helpful. But not many. And definitely not with time, for the love of God.
Reclaim your circadian sovereign divinity!
Thanks for making me laugh out loud- while simultaneously having compassion and empathy for your frustration at such a ridiculous control-freak mechanism as “switching the clocks”! I couldn’t agree more...🙌🙌🙌
I find the exploration of how (certain) humans have measured and accounted for time fascinating. Like the Gregorian vs Mayan calendar. Why do we have October (8) as the tenth month and December (10) as the twelfth month...?
Leap years are the cherry on top of the arbitrary time-cake! 🤪