
1 minute read
Trouble waking up? You know who to blame.
Where did our collective societal grudge against mornings come from?
Our fictional universe presents mornings as bright sunlight pouring through our curtains. Birds happily chirping outside our windows. The smell of freshly brewed coffee — and, if we’re lucky, a hearty breakfast of pancakes and eggs.
Reality, however, includes tightly pulled curtains. Birdsong drowned out by the 12 alarms we’ve set on our iPhones. And by the time we get that coffee, we’re already in the car and stuck in the drivethrough.
Yet we as a society don’t truly show how much we dislike mornings until it comes to daylight saving time — when we push our clocks ahead an hour at the start of spring, with the hope of enjoying more sunlight and fewer stars.
In fact, the whole idea of daylight saving is to push more sunlight into the evenings, and less into our mornings. So, if we were hoping for more sunlight to fill our bedrooms as we wake up, we better consider sleeping in.
If your day starts at 6 a.m., then you’re experiencing what it was like at 5 a.m. just a week ago, when standard time was still in effect. And really, it is still 5 a.m. — just not in the reality where the Uniform Time Act of 1966 exists.
Twice a year, we revisit the same argument: Why is moving our clocks backward and forward still a thing? We debate the origins, the supposed environmental benefits, and how all of that applies — or