Time is made up. Or to use the more pseudo-academic phrasing; time is a construct. I am writing this, as all of my non-Arizona/Hawaii readers should immediately recognize, because of the onset of the obsolete abyssal horror known as “Daylight Saving Time.” DST. Those words ring in my ears like a thousand murder hornets coming to turn my body into Swiss cheese. Also known as “Spring Forward” in some parts of the States, Daylight Saving Time marks the point of the year when we succumb to the pressures of Big Farm and set our clocks one-hour forward in order to ensure that farmers have enough daylight to plant their crops or something.
At least, I think that’s why. For urbanites such as myself that seems to be the extent of our understanding of Daylight Saving Time. The story we tell ourselves is that at some point in the distant past – no one knows how long ago – our wise ancestors decided, out of the graciousness of their hearts, that farmers and planters needed an extra hour of daylight in order to get all their planting done. Because the Earth would not oblige such a request, these ancestors took matters into their own hands and decided to CHANGE TIME ITSELF through the awesome power of the American legal system. Ever since then in early Spring we’ve all, farmer and non-farmer alike, submitted ourselves to one week of getting up in the dark, tired from lack of sleep, in order to appease those True Americans who grow our crops.
This story is probably not true. I’m quite sure the real history of DST is a very interesting story and that at least one person has gotten themselves a tenure-track job in a collegiate history department somewhere for telling it, but I’m not going to look it up too closely. It feels like I got up at six AM today instead of my usual seven after all and I’m grumpy because of it. Vox dot com, creator of the beloved “Vox Explainer,” tells me that DST started during WWI as an energy conservation trick – with more light at night, less fuel would be needed for after-dinner activities – and became a national thing in the sixties. It apparently does not work as an energy saving thing. So, it looks like that farmer story probably comes from the deep well of suspicion that city dwellers have for country folk who want to steal our time.
From the one article I read, it seems like an interesting topic, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Any graduate student reading this can feel free to steal it for themselves. What I do want to talk about is the awesome power of people just sort of shrugging their shoulders and going “yeah, sure, let’s change our clocks on a random day of the year, why not!”
People in the United States love time. Visiting new fast-food restaurants and extracting excess profit from workers are the only two things this country loves more. We schedule things down to the minute. Kids get it from the very beginning. Twenty minutes for lunch, thirty for recess if you’re lucky. We teach them to tell time in elementary school, have them time experiments, and run exercise classes based on timed increments. Exact time is everywhere.
It’s the exactness of time that bothers me. The official definition of a second, developed at the Thirteenth General Conference of the International Committee for Weights and Measures in 1967 goes as follows: "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom." This is the dumbest fucking definition of a second. We all know how long a second is. It’s this long and has nothing to do with the caesium-133 atom. The more exact we get with our definitions of time, the farther it gets away from the any sort of actual lived experience – yes I know all the cool Twitter posters hate that term, but it makes sense here.
So, what the hell does this have to do with Daylight Saving Time? I seem to have gone rather far afield from my lede. Re-read that last sentence of the previous paragraph, ignoring the rather paltry bon mot tacked on at the end. The divorce of time from any sort of actual real-world experience. I am by far the stupidest person to write about this, so I won’t try to reinvent the wheel. E.P. Thompson, for my money, gets at the heart of it in his essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Go read that. You can find it here. Essentially, industrial capitalism – people working in factories – changed our relationship to time, all in the name of making more money for a small amount of people. We experience time in a different manner than our pre-industrial ancestors did. We instead think of time in terms of capital. “Saving time,” “spending time,” “banking time,” “making time,” “wasting time,” all treat our experience of the world around us as if it were a commodity, something to be traded and invested in. Humans created time, and now we want to own it.
I usually like to end these things with like a call to action or something. Calling for the abolition of time seems dumb though. I like being able to celebrate my birthday, and knowing that a ninety-minute movie is most likely better than a two-hour movie. So, I guess I’ll just leave you with a milquetoast plea to be more aware of things that are supposedly out of human control. If we can make it so that we just change our clocks twice a year, what other seemingly impossible things can we do?
In Suburbia USA where I grew up, the explanation always given to me, for the “Fall Back” one anyway, was that it was done so that schoolchildren wouldn’t have to wait for the bus in the dark all winter long...