Daylight Savings, or Daylight robbery?

The clocks went forward when I'm writing this, it likely won't be posted until waaaayyyy past March, but I feel like it's something to talk about.

Every year we have the same discussions about daylight savings. Is it a relic of a bygone era? Should we get rid of it or should we keep it? Does it matter? I'm not going to give an opinion on either side, but I will explore why it exists.

Because it's interesting, especially if you think about it in a historical sense. Throughout time(1) the idea of a fixed period or duration was extremely abstract, but it was still important. If meetings were to happen, its useful to know when everyone will be together. If you say 'we will meet when the sun is at its highest', that is a time that people will understand. A lot of myths and historic moments usually start with saying 'daybreak' or 'twilight' to give the idea when things happened.

But it's only recently that an actual time system has been used to dictate our lives.

I've been listening to 'You're dead to me', a podcast on BBC radio and BBC sounds that talks about history with comedians and historians. And Greg Jenner. Greg Jenner is important. The episode about Timekeeping (2023) really explored this more comprehensibly, talking about how people used to categorise time.

To start with I'll be talking about time that doesn't effect too much on the day to day life, which is what most of history is.

At the beginning, times were needed to know about the year. Back then, it was visibly evident. You could tell that summer was summer and winter was winter. What's interesting is the different festivities and celebrations that the year symbolised. For example, Harvest happened at the beginning of autumn and the summer solstice shows the beginning of the world becoming darker. These would allow the population to organise their time to better adapt to the change in the climate, as well as to help collaborate with neighbours and friends(2). In fact, in the book Celts by Prof Alice Roberts, she talks that these festivities would be a time to congregate, air out greivences and form bonds. The simplicity of that could be seen in things such as Stonehenge, Woodhenge, and the Brochs up in Scotland.

But as life gets complicated, so does timekeeping. The Egyptians and the Greeks formed systems that used water and the sun to create a more specific sense of temporal location(3). The Chinese(4) even had a time scents, where certain smells in a building could tell you what time of day it is by putting oils in candles.

I could keep going on about the history of timekeeping, honestly thats not a bad thing, but this is about daylight savings right? Let's stick to that.

So, when did it get weird?

It's of course when Britain ruled the waves, around the 1700's.

You see, there were a lot people in Britain who only needed to know when it was light and when it got dark, as they were workers of the land and its not best to work at night. But things changed with the industrial revolution. Suddenly shift work came into being, with people working before sunrise and going home after the sun. No sunlight for you! This was a massive cultural shift as the population's entire daily routine was now segmented into work and home. It's important to note that people often got up in the night to socialise(5), but with the advent of work taking over the day people saw less and less of each other(6). The Puritan attitude of 'Work as moral' and the idea of 'wasting time' was suddenly put into the fabric of British life, effectively cutting off so much of our lives for those who demanded profit.

To show this, there was a man(7) called Richard Baxter (1660?) who solidifies this in an essay saying;

"If you idle away this life, will god ever give you another here?"

and,

"Idleness is the most heinous sin"

He also said,

"...by wasting time, you are guilty of robbing God himself."

If you look at time in that way, you of course see time as something you owe to the divine. Time is devotion, wasting time is sinful.

But who benefits from this? The factory owner, the capitalist, the shareholder, the church. They have placed themselves firmly in the seat that was put there for god. Shift work must be followed as to be a good worker you must do a good job, and in doing a good job the company thrives(8). When the company thrives, you are saving your eternal soul from damnation.

With the change in approach to work complete, to best serve the elite we now get to daylight savings. In short, it created a more hours of daylight for the working during WW1. Meaning that more things could be done to help survive, like crop managemnet and factory shifts. But what happened after the war, and subsequently WW2, when we didn't have such an existential need for daylight?

Nothing, we kept it.

So is it good to keep? Or completely unnecessary?

It's difficult to separate the reality that daylight savings at this point is for control. Control over when we wake up. Control over when we sleep and socialise. But it's also control for systematic cohesion, we will know when the trains will run. It also might mean more sunlight for most of the year.

But that is only going to work if we ware thinking about capitalising our time. Most people are much more laissez-faire when given the option. So could it be more accurate to see Daylight savings as something that is kept to control the population? To get them worried and tired so they don't think too much about how they could actually use their day? Is Daylight savings more to do with Capitalism than to benefit the people? Hell, even when we lose an hour we're thankful, should we when it was taken from us earlier in the year?

To conclude, I don't know. I think it's important to question why we do things, and in reearching for this I've only really seen it be good for those at the top the chain rather than the general population. In Britain we've lost so much connection to the land we call home that its sad to think that in classifying time we have also stripped the basic animal instinct of just embracing now and being content with where we are. The Puritans(9) truly did a number on us that has lead to colonialism and detachment, and justified it with 'What would Jesus do?'. Not this I don't think.

It's important to notice that time is a construct. It exists because we say it does. But that means we can adjust, reimagine it to make it work of all of us, rather than just those who make money off of it. That's why I will always admire those in the past who knew this and tried to show it by threatening clocks. From the Romans threatening sundails, to anarchists trying to blow up the Greenwich clock, I hope we can stop worshipping the dials and just work with it.

Oh, I guess I think its a scam. Daylight savings is a scam.

(1) the concept, not an actual time, idiot.

(2) I believe that its shown in historical records that winter was a time of hibernation but also peace. People became fragile as winter claimed lives rather than war, where warfare wasn't smart as resources were stretched thin.

(3) I'm going to regret not writing this, so let me fill it in here. People who needed a specific times were astrologers and officials. There's a correlation between control and social need, just as there is today.

(4) This is in that podcast 'You're dead to me' I spoke about. Give it a listen, as I'm really paring it down.

(5) It's really interesting, as it means that our sleep cycle is more complex that day and night. Also, nightlife cannot be ignored, its baked into our DNA if this way of forming our day.

(6) You can argue that's happening now. Hustle culture is killing us as a community as well as mentally. Have a break, touch grass, you deserve it.

(7) Bastard

(8) Higher wages? Please, that's way to nice.

(9) Bastards