For most people, that's never. But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time.

The bigger question is why? Now that we have electric lights, why do you want equal daytime before and after noon?

Noon is generally not midday for most people. Far more stores are open at 7 PM than are open at 5 AM. Far more people are still up at 9 PM than are waking up at 3 AM. And the "9 to 5" song would center the day at 1 PM. It seems that in general society has decided hours after 12 PM are more useful than hours before 12 PM. It's far easier to just change the clocks to have 1 PM be midday, keeping DST year round, than to change society.

I wonder if it was ever so. Did noon mark the middle of the day in traditional societies? If so, when and why did it change?

Well, that is the very definition of noon. Which is handy, as the noon point doesn't move around much (a few minutes) over the year, while in northern latitudes the time of sunrise and set can move by several hours across the year. Noon has no special meaning beyond marking the middle of the daylight. All times are expressed relative to that and of course there is full freedom how to set up common time points like star of office hours, start of school etc.

Noon is not middle of daylight. Not everyone lives in place where that is aligned.

Well, sure, as we have time zones, it is not precisely aligned. But all time zones are aligned so that the noon point is somewhere inside them, not outside of the time zone.

> But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time.

On the eastern edges of current time zones. There's a 45-minute to 55-minute difference to cities on the western borders and many of them daylight time would be closer to "natural noon" than standard time.

I'd prefer one that fixes the clock to sunrise and lets noon and sunset drift rather than fixing noon and letting sunrise and sunset drift.

I could also try and get my coworkers to move our meetings earlier in summer so I can leave work by 3, but for some reason changing a "clock" seems to be more effective than getting people to buy into summer hours and winter hours.

Where is that?

Lol I meant the time that better aligns with the position of the sun relative to where you stand.

Closest to zenith, I presume.