By Jaden Singh
I was really looking forward to daylight savings this year. It was a minor (very minor) personal cause for celebration when sunset crawled past 6:00 p.m. in February. The one hour jump on March 10, by comparison, felt properly massive — and after the fact, it is everything I had hoped. When I walk back to my Fifth Avenue dorm, the view of the Cathedral of Learning is pretty again!
I don’t think I suffer from seasonal depression, but perhaps I do suffer from seasonal anger. I carry the standard frustration at being greeted by a pitch black sky after getting out of a late afternoon class. I am irritated when I look out any window at 5:30 p.m. and feel some natural inkling that I should be getting ready to sleep. Most importantly, I also prefer to spend a large fraction of my free time outdoors. Southwest Pennsylvania’s beautiful forests are much less beautiful when, even with a flashlight, I can barely see 20 feet ahead of me. It got on my nerves when I would finish up my work, feel a spark of excitement at the prospect of getting out of the city for a bit, and then have that excitement dampened by the realization that I wouldn’t be able to see anything.
This is not to say there’s nothing nice about early sunsets. I do appreciate a good night sky, but it’s not like you can see much in Pittsburgh anyways.. So I’d just rather there be daylight.
Wikipedia’s daylight savings page has an extensive list of considerations for why or why not daylight savings time is a sensible practice. There are sections on electricity consumption, economic effects, health effects, social effects, and the general inconvenience of having to shift your clocks around twice a year. Many of the cited studies are either inconclusive or have been disputed by additional research. A 2008 summary by the Department of Energy determined no significant changes in traffic and gasoline consumption after the 2007 time shift. The stock exchange studies I found included a lot of intra-research squabbling and disagreement.
However, some of the undisputed results of daylight savings do look consequential. A 2016 study determined that on the Monday after daylight savings, judges are more likely to hand out longer sentences.
If there are strong societal reasons for abolishing daylight savings time, I am generally willing to hear about them about it. I don’t feel so strongly about the time shift that I think major sacrifices should be made for the sake of one more bright hour. I simply want to say that hour makes me happy. It lets me do the outdoor activities I love for longer. Had we not changed the clocks, I would miss that hour in the summer and I would miss it right now.
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