Technolandy

Day 120 (of 2024/25) time changes still ain’t easy – and making less sense

Another weekend not quite at an equinox or solace, and yet another change to our manual clocks…  we can’t pretend time doesn’t matter… as people continue to wonder why we continue some ‘old things’ – the changing of an hour in spring/fall to try to ‘find an hour of sunshine’ makes less and less sense. Annually we are getting more reports looking at the bad things that can be correlated to the weekend – the changing of body routines is known to impact sleep cycles, eating habits (not for the better) and even driving styles. “Longer evenings for unsafer commutes” is always a problem https://www.limaohio.com/top-stories/2025/03/08/the-spring-forward-of-daylight-saving-time-comes-with-health-concerns/

An annual reminder that sometimes we do things “because we’ve always done it” ~ or at least as long as a couple generations can remember… with societal pressure keeping some clocks off by an hour for 6 months of a year due to inconvenience… and for many a moment of hesitation hoping and wondering if the clock auto-corrected itself. Though the end is coming. It has to be. This is a historic piece of systemic bias that no longer is needed for what was once intended. In Canada, Saskatchewan has not disappeared from making the decision to not change clocks, and likewise Arizona in the US remains populated.

Lots of legislation gets introduced to remove this practice, but it seems like everyone is waiting for ‘someone else’s to start the latest domino trail… But we have to also note that despite what a lot of research tells us about sleep (and learning), it’ll get ignored for the convenience of someone else – we know that teens have always had a biological tendency towards later sleep times, but we still encourage schools to start as early as possible (with some exceptions… I appreciate those – even though I have typically appreciated the earlier start times…) and consequence those that struggle with the morning pressure to not be late for school. 

At a time when the world is shifting to more flexible work times (and even shopping times) the Dolly Parton song 9to5 continues to be the standard of many standardized days. We could look at this as well, knowing full well that the usual rebuttal will devolve back into why schools are identified as primary care centers for families so that parents can go to work… though I’ll continually point out that if this is the case, ought we not do a better job being open for the families that often have less resources for daycare support and earn less money to make things work because their part of the social contract has them working weekends and evenings. But I guess the family working at Dollarama doesn’t get to have the same resources as the family run doctors office. 

Time matters. I still have a re-edit of this look at ‘clocks’ https://technolandy.wordpress.com/2021/02/10/day-100-of-190-clocks-with-thanks-to-hopkinsjeff/ as an inquiry nudge continues to tick (pun intended) in the back of my mind that time and clocks and things dealing with time have a bigger influence on some of our societal evolutions than we may think… and with digital advances continuing… might be that the removal of Ben Franklin’s (likely also intended as a pun) idea of time change can be put into the ‘imagine that people used to do this’ file of buzzfeed.

In the meantime, my body should be adjusted to the time change just in time for spring break…