Have you considered waking up an hour earlier? Unlike the reverse (where you have the start of the workday as a deadline), there's likely nothing to stop you from shifting your day to start and end an hour sooner!

My issue is that work ends at 5pm and the sun is already down.

Business hours. I'm at work from 8AM to 6PM five days a week. Near the winter solstice, the sun sets around 4:30-5:30.

Getting up earlier would just make me have to go to bed earlier. It's dark either way.

Even if your schedule is flexible, other people's schedules aren't. This means that if I want to shift my schedule to wake up earlier to take advantage of the morning light, I either have to miss out on evening social activities (lets say an 8pm dinner), or miss out on sleep.

You think you do, but I’m not sure you do, and I know you wouldn’t if you were a teenager forced to wake up before sunrise a big part of the year.

Source: I was a teenager in a place that observed permanent DST in a heavy north latitude.

As a teenager in a place with "normal" DST observance I woke up at 5:50 every day; trust me, I didn't see the sun anyway.

Ladies and gentlemen, a proposal.

Permanent standard time, seven hour work day.

Everybody is happy!