Jason+M’s+2018+OpEd+Article

This past Sunday, as I’m sure all of you are well aware, marked the most recent annual day where we spring our clocks ahead one hour in the name of saving daylight. Experts claim it’s to boost efficiency and conserve energy, but at what cost? Is an extra hour of daylight in the latter portion of the day worth the hour shift in our daily activities and the physiological harm imposed on the human mind and body by being forced to adapt to a new schedule so abruptly?
 * Saving Daylight or Saving My Sleep? **

Daylight Savings was established so that participation regions and people may make better use of daylight. Take an hour of sunshine from the morning, when everybody is asleep, and plop it back into the afternoon, where people can actually make use of it rather than sleep through it. Why? Efficiency.

The world used to be dependent on daylight. It dictated the active hours of any man, woman, or child living in a world where the seasons were in control of the human. But then came the boom of modern technology. In America was the Gilded Age bringing about rapid industrialization and numerous inventions, one of which being Thomas Edison’s practical perfection of Sir Humphry Davy’s electric light, allowing Americans to, for the first time ever, push the seasons into the background creating a sense of power and dominance over nature.

Now, in a time where technology is at its best, the seasons, and daylight in particular are seemingly irrelevant. Although seemingly irrelevant, that does not deprive daylight of its importance. The presence of daylight promotes activity, safety, and productivity, and it simply lightens the mood (literally!), all highly important components to human life and modern society. With these benefits in mind why wouldn’t you want to maximize that daylight time?

The primary purpose of daylight savings is to maximize the amount of time we get to see the sun every day, for productivity’s sake. In the consumerist world we live in today efficiency and productivity is everything, and sacrificing any amount of that sends you straight down the food chain.

No matter how advanced technology may be or may become daylight isn’t something that can just be ignored and pushed into the background. Daylight is wonderful and an effort to maximize that is important, however I believe there are better ways to do it than manipulating time in the current method of daylight savings. Losing an hour of sleep and having to completely readjust your sleep schedule really does suck but I suppose a week or two of sleep deprived torture is a fair exchange for eight months of increased productivity and sunshine. Maybe there’s a better approach to this whole maximizing daylight thing but that’s for a later discussion because it’s 11:04 P.M. and I really need to get some good sleep to catch up from the daylight savings time change and somehow hope my sleep schedule gets fixed and I don’t feel like falling asleep 24/7.