Just to be clear, I live in New York City. It gets dark at 4:30 this time of year. I know how frustrating that is.
But I also think that if this bill passed, most would discover that getting up an hour earlier in the morning is clearly worse. Others have posted some great studies in this thread, but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do. We stay up late on Friday evenings and sleep in late on Saturday mornings, without a care for all of the wasted Saturday daylight.
The numbers on a clock are arbitrary—you can change them, but all you're really changing are the societal commitments for which people are obligated to wake up. Our society is already too optimized for early risers, and late risers are paying the price. I don't think we should make the problem even worse just so we can shift around a few hours of sunlight.
No, that's what we do on the weekend when we're catching up on lost sleep from the week, and staying out Friday night.
I know a lot of people with flexible schedules, and they're predominantly morning people who wake up around 6 am. Now I'm not saying they're average or anything, but it certainly disproves your idea that people inherently sleep in late when left to their own preferences.
Why are they catching up on lost sleep in the morning, during precious daylight? They could go to sleep earlier Friday evening and have more sun.
> I know a lot of people with flexible schedules, and they're predominantly morning people who wake up around 6 am. Now I'm not saying they're average or anything, but it certainly disproves your idea that people inherently sleep in late when left to their own preferences.
But I'm talking about the average person. Yes there are morning people who prefer waking up at 6, but most don't.
Not if they want a social life. It's not like sun trumps everything.
But shifting to DST all the time lets people go out Friday night, get to bed an hour earlier, sleep as much as they need, and still have that extra hour of daylight on Saturday! :)
Here's where we fundamentally disagree—I think that extra hour is completely imaginary! Our natural wake up times are mostly determined by the sun, so on average, a person who naturally wakes up at 10 am standard time on Saturday will just wake up at 11 am instead. You end up with exactly the same amount of daylight!
The way that we experience time isn't something a law can change.
My wakeup times are entirely flexible and pretty arbitrary. Depending on the job I've had and how late my friends like to go out, I've had sleep schedules in the past ranging from 10pm-6am, all the way to 2am-10am. And they were all fine and healthy.
Most adult's wake up doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the sun. I don't have a "natural" wakeup time. I wake up 8 hours after whenever I went to sleep.
So I absolutely get an hour more of daylight with DST because my schedule shifts an hour earlier. Work starts an hour earlier so I wake up an hour earlier. That's just how it works.
No, they aren’t. Even with the progressive infantilization of children over the last several decades, its still generally widely accepted that children over 12 can be left alone for a few hours at a time.
Though shifting the standard workweek to 30 hours and adjusting to that by moving the standard start time forward by two hours wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
Schools usually close ~2 hours before the end of the conventional work day, though some (usually those for kids younger than teenage years) have optional after-school supervision programs available.
For teenagers, such programs are less common because the social consensus is that teenagers do not need constant adult supervision and can be unsupervised for a period of a few hours at a time.
And if we can get DST all year round (which I'm personally all-for), it could help be the impetus to finally shift high school times.
The fact of the matter is, our sleep schedules are determined largely by our school/work schedules. Simply from the popularity of DST in the summer, it seems clear that people do prefer for society to coordinate to wake up an hour earlier in order to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.
Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.