by jorvi 10 hours ago
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset
I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office.
Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
That's what everyone says. But it turns out people hate spending their morning in darkness for more light at night. Which makes perfect sense:
https://washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-...
> the inkling of light they get during their winter commute
It's not an inkling. Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning. That's exactly when you need it.
That has to be latitude dependent.
> you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning
Hah "hours". Not in Northern Europe you're not. My commute is dark on both sides. If I had to choose which side I'd prefer to be brighter I'd prefer the end of the day rather than feeling like my daylight has been wasted in the office. I shift my schedule in winter to make up for this as best I can.
I guess. I'm at 46 degrees and civil twilight at Christmas starts at 7am. I get up at 6:30, so yeah, dead of winter, I spend 30 minutes in darkness. But that's better than 1:30.
I guess it kinda hinges on this idea of "wasting" daylight. I don't feel like that. I want the sun to wake me up, and have no problem doing whatever I like when it's dark in the evening. Do people generally go on hikes after work? I go out for drinks. haha
56 degrees here (Denmark, and grew up in Ireland @ 53 degrees).
> I guess it kinda hinges on this idea of "wasting" daylight. I don't feel like that. I want the sun to wake me up
The problem is that during the darkest parts of winter, even if I postpone my wake up as long as possible, I'm still getting up in the dark if I want to be able to commute into work on time. There's no sunlight waking me up.
> Do people generally go on hikes after work? I go out for drinks. haha
No, but I still have to do things like walk the dog, do the shopping on the way home. I find it a lot more pleasant starting out that part of day with a bit of sunlight.
Also, yes, drinks. This is Northern Europe after all.
EDIT to add: Civil twilight in December where I am starts ~07:40, and I also get up around 06:30 (when not dealing with insomnia like tonight).
Also from Denmark, but I would prefer permanent standard time (just like it was prior to 1982); yes, it's still dark in the morning, but at least I won't have to wait months before I start seeing sunlight for my commute. I can only manage the darkness for so long, before the winter depression truly takes hold. Permanent summer time would be devastating to a lot of people here.
07:40 still sounds pretty early when compared to 66 degrees where we could expect the civil twilight after 09:00 in December. You'd go to school at 08:00 in the dark and go home at 15:00, also in the dark.
cries in 62° N
Do people generally go on hikes after work?
Yes. Of course. That’s the whole point of shifting the daylight hours.
You get off work and head to the crag to climb a few routes before it gets dark. It’s like a little mini weekend every evening for those summer months.
But yeah, if you never take advantage of that, it’s understandable to want some light in the morning I guess. But yikes, why not go out and enjoy the sunshine?
> Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning.
Sadly, not if you're a student living in a basement in Vancouver!
> Vancouver
Southerners...
(Chiming in from Denmark)
Icelanders want a word with you :P
Wait. Somebody else who uses the dwarvish name for Gandalf?
Had to do a double take, as that's my steam handle.
“Garden level”
fwiw, getting sunlight from behind a modern window is almost the same as getting it from a led or lightbulb, vastly insufficient. The glass filters out the specific frequencies that are most beneficial to us. You need to get out...
Why not just start school later?
I've heard it's so parents can get the kids to school at 0800 and then start job a 0900. But why school is out at 1500 and job at 1700 is a mystery.
Protestant work ethic? I know it's a terrible reason. Seems to be the reason, though.
DST and time zones have been invented much later than Protestantism, so I wouldn’t worry about the ethical part specifically
It really depends on your interests: I use daylight for sports after work, really like being able to surf until 22:30 midsummer (52 degrees), so DST works for me. On the other hand, also don't mind the switching between wintertime and summertime, it's just like a minor jetlag we all have no problem with when going on holiday.
>it's just like a minor jetlag we all have no problem with when going on holiday.
I can only say speak for yourself, some of us have major problems with jet lag. Especially as someone on the west coast, I am exhausted any time I have to travel east for work
Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
Where I live June sunrise (with DST) is 5:11am and sunset is 8:21pm (a city on the American east coast). I just can’t imagine a majority of people would want 4:11 rising and 7:21 setting.
Clock is a social contract. China has just one time zone and it seems to work fine.
The thing about DST is it makes every scheduled event move, all at the same time.
It shifts my contracted start time at work, my first meeting, when places start serving lunch, when my kid needs to get to ballet class, when my sportsball club meets, and when the supermarket closes. All at once.
Lawmakers changing the time shown on clocks is, I think, a lot easier than society changing the social contract.
In June, they wouldn't. That's why we currently change the clocks. But changing the clocks sucks, so you have to optimize for either the winter or the summer.
In the summer, we already have lots of sunlight regardless, so it doesn't make sense to optimize for that.
Winter sucks anyways when you live in the north. I grew up at 56 degrees north and you are cooked no matter what is done. Better to optimize April-October.
> If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed.
I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours.
Changing the time to give people more light in the evening frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.
School and the workday already awkwardly don't work together. Schools often end an hour or two after the traditional work day. It wouldn't be crazy to have an effective 'DST' via just adjusting the school start/end times -- start at 10am for part of the year dammit.
It's the obvious real solution that sidesteps all the personal-preference-driven claims on what option is "objectively" better/healthier/whatever, but corporate society isn't ready for it I guess
>If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed.
If that's what passes for aspiration these days then the labour movement truly is dead.
It's been dead ever since workers thought 40h work weeks and 2 weeks off a year was a good deal.
yeah im curious if people will end up liking it. sucks from my perspective.
Yeah I don't agree with this at all. I want the light when I'm getting up in the morning. When I'm coming home from work it's the end of the day: I'm tired, I'm hustling home to do errands or chores or make dinner, I'm probably going to spend that time inside anyway because that's where the things that I need to get done are, and if it it's going to be cold and windy, it's going to be cold and windy in the evening. I much much prefer daylight in the morning and I like when noon is actually noon (+/- depending on longitude). I'm not looking forward to the time change and I'm not looking forward to the sun setting at 9 PM.
If it wasn't for that damn 9 AM Monday meeting (ugh) I would just keep my clocks sent to standard time and start work an hour late in the summer.
It's weird, my opinion is the exact opposite from yours, but for the same reasons. When it's the morning, I haven't had the time to get tired yet. So I don't care yet, I don't require the sunlight at that time of the day. And it's always a better feeling when there's only a bit of darkness left before sunrise, when the alternative is feeling like the day was wasted as you step outside and it's already night out. Depending on your timing, you may also see the sunrise while commuting to work, which I find enjoyable.
In the evening I'm tired, so I want the extra sunlight to cancel that out a bit, and I want it so I have more opportunities to do things after work. No one is going to do anything for fun in the morning, so giving the light to that time period is wasting it. I want it after work, so I can go somewhere, enjoy the extra warmth, just be anywhere besides home and work.
> I want the light when I'm getting up in the morning
I apologize society is inconveniencing you.
interesting, I see his preference is some kind of slavering radical antisocial screed whereas yours is the universal desire of all of society
Kinda?
> In summer 2019, the Province conducted a public engagement on time observance that saw participation from a record 223,000 people, with 93% supporting adopting year-round DST. Similarly, across all industry groups and nearly all occupational groups, support for year-round DST observance was higher than 90%.
The problem of offices is not when we spend time in them but rather that we spend time in them at all. What a banal hell it is we have consented to endure compared to the comforts of our homes or of any space actually designed for the wellness of human beings or even focused work.
Also don't forget losing daylight in summer evenings.
Going outside for lunch is a great idea.
Except for people like me who struggle to wake up before dawn. And whether people prefer light after work doesn't change the available scientific evidence which suggests there are significant negative health effects of waking up too early relative to sunrise, but no significant health benefits from having sunlight hours after work. People's preferences in this case are generally only mildly held and typically are not well informed by the science. I suspect if more people were aware of the deleterious health effects, their stated preferences would change.
Except for the health benefits of not being killed by tired drivers in the dark late afternoons, which is a thing.
Currently it's doubly bad because the clocks changing also cause a spike in deaths.
Time is an arbitrary construct in the sense that the mere lack of arbitrary change in time is a net benefit.
I.e., anyone who doesn’t like the change in either direction can just change schedules accordingly for business hours. Whether that means 8-4 or 9-5 or 10-6 is irrelevant. The fact that we would stop altering schedules twice a year is a positive.
No changing when schools and kindergartens are open. Where I live, kindergarten closes 16:30. So 8–16 it is!