I read an article on Daylight Saving Time today which, regardless of how I felt about it, certainly got a lot of commenters worked up. A health researcher in Britain has proposed eliminating Daylight Saving Time as an ‘easy’ way to improve health by giving more daylight hours at times when people are more likely to go outside to exercise. I won’t comment on the merit of this, as I haven’t personally done any studies or research on the topic. But it’s the comments… oh my. Leaving aside the either uninformed or ‘bashing’ tone of most of them, there wasn’t a single one that indicated they had even the faintest inkling of why Daylight Saving Time exists in the first place. But every one was certain that it was a stupid idea and should be abolished immediately. What kind of a moron would invent this crazy scheme and then go to the effort of implementing it in Europe, Asia, and North America? Can you imagine being so dense as to go to that kind of effort for no reason at all? Crazy. Just crazy, archaic, and shameful.
Reading all of that blow-hard rhetoric reminded me of a Seinfeld episode in which George discovers that the baseball team he works for uses polyester uniforms instead of cotton. Clearly uniforms made of cotton would reduce the temperature of the players out on the field in the hot sun and give them an advantage over their opponents who would be sweating it out in polyester. George relates to Seinfeld how ludicrous it is that they have polyester uniforms. Seinfeld considers this and then remarks shrewdly “Yeah. I wonder why that is.” The suggestion in that comment was, of course, completely lost on George. His players triumph in their first game, making him a hero. But in their second game they suffer a humiliating defeat, because….. all of the uniforms had shrunk during their first washing and the players are hobbled by them. George learns the hard way why they don’t make uniforms out of cotton.
So this brings me back to Daylight Saving Time. Not a single posting out of what I estimate to be at least a hundred thought to say “I wonder why that is”. Rather they nearly all chose to assume morons did it. I have discovered during my life that there are a lot of things you may look at that happened in the past that would prompt you write the perpetrator off as an idiot. But it turns out that most people aren’t idiots. Most people are pretty smart and don’t waste their time and energy on things that are clearly stupid and a waste of time. If you take this stance — that whoever did that thing that offends your sensibilities might not have been a moron — then you are more likely to keep an open mind and realize that what they did made perfect sense in the situation at the time. You may not have benefit of the knowledge of what those circumstances were, but you can rest assured that they were different than the one that you are in now. And if you try a little bit, you might even be able to hypothesize valid reasons for someone doing something that on the surface appears to you like they were being an idiot.
At any rate, I’ll get off my soapbox now. Surprisingly, it turns out there is a reason for daylight savings time — and a good one — afterall. It has to do with the First World War. The idea had been around since 1895, but not enacted by any country until Germany and its allies decided to do it in 1916 in order to conserve precious resources for the war effort. How does that compute? Because if you get up an hour later than normal during the winter months, the sun has had an extra hour to warm and light your house, therefore your house is that much warmer and brighter when you get out of your cozy bed, and you will use less coal and wood to heat your house, and less wax, oil, or electricity to keep it lit. Simple. And it was apparently also very effective. Conversely, getting up an hour earlier in the summer takes better advantage of the sun as well, as it’s up earlier.
There are two points I wanted to make in all of this:
- It is so easy to jump to conclusions about the motivations and mental state of other people when you have no idea of the circumstances under which they made their decisions. As a rule, I’ve found it’s best to always assume that other people are smart, too — probably about as smart as you — and recognize that they generally try not to make decisions that will make their lives harder — just like you. Ergo, things that on the surface appear to be stupid probably aren’t. You just don’t have (or didn’t care to consider) the right information. It’s you who are being the moron;
- If you care anything about conserving resources, as any environmentally-minded person would be, then Daylight Saving Time is probably something you don’t want to be too gung-ho about abolishing. There are indeed studies that suggest that implementing Daylight Saving Time actually increases resource usage (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Energy_use), but there was a benefit at one time when the energy distribution system was of a different kind and complexity. Maybe the energy advantages of the Daylight Saving Time system has passed, but don’t decide too hastily before gathering all of the facts.
Well said!