Honestly, you should be skipping dinner in winter. Your body isn’t active enough to need any food in the evenings.

Just keep it as bright as you can until it’s time for bed, then switch everything off. It’s a lot easier to turn off artificial light than it is to try to sleep when the sun is still shining.

I think that assumes a lot about what people do in the winter. I do most of my running in the winter because the summers are too hot to run, for instance.

Yes, it’s obviously a generalization. All else equal, the summer days are longer and the people are less lethargic.

> Honestly, you should be skipping dinner in winter

Do you just sit around while your friends and family eat? Do you just not enjoy eating food?

I’d be sad and bored if I skipped dinner as my default for an entire season.

I swim three miles at a rapid pace before I go home in the evening. How far and fast do I need to swim to achieve an active state so I can eat dinner?

If you spend one a half hours every day swimming, I commend you.

Your comment is a bit low effort. Did you assume I was talking about you specifically? That’s a bit absurd.

To be fair, you did say “you” and “your”, inviting the reader to assume you are writing specifically for them.

I am grown up in Germany with the old wisdom that lunch should be the main meal and dinner should lighter and around 6 pm, 7 at the latest. Nothing after that.

Whether that's correct or not I don't want to debate. There are for sure many different opinions. I know only 1 obese person who might have been living somewhat according to that rule, the vast majority isn't overweight.

How can you have your main meal for lunch and not feel sleepy for the rest of the day?

You don't have massive meals and not much alcohol if any

in Spain they do it by taking a nap! extremely civilized

Why does it matter what number is displayed on the clock? Can't you just wake up earlier or later to your preference?

lol. Sure, as long as you don’t have to report to a job everyday. Very few have the privilege of adjusting their sleep/wake cycle to correspond with the changing seasons.

Well the daylight savings advocates who want to force 10 pm sunsets on everybody can wake up earlier if they wish to have an extra hour of sunlight.

For everyone else, no. We cant sleep in for an hour.

That's not how it works.

The time when my kids go to school is determined by the current official time, not when I choose to wake up. It's regulated by federal and state laws, and local bylaws.

The visitation times at the hospital, court appearances, etc. are all set to the current official time, not when I choose to wake up. It's regulated by federal and state laws, and local bylaws.

The airport curfew is determined by the official time, not when I choose to wake up. It's regulated by federal and state laws, and local bylaws.

Your point would make sense if everyone had to do only one thing every day, and people existed in small (< Dunbar's number) isolated communities.

But we don't: people do multiple things, interact with different communities, and all these schedules are interdependent. Changing all of them is a problem that requires coordination, which is exactly the kind of thing we maintain governments for.

The current coordination point is that it's convenient if all these things move one hour forward in the summer, and the mechanism to achieve this is that we change clocks twice a year, instead of the vastly more difficult alternative of maintaining two separate sets of schedules for everything.

But it looks like consensus is moving on (again!), and people no longer think that moving everything by one hour in the summer is a good idea (or rather, moving it back for the winter is a bad idea). So they'll use the coordination mechanism to make it so.

The person you are arguing against and 'splaining to is on the same side of the argument you are. He's turning the other side's argument against them. He's saying "if you think schedules are flexible, flex your schedule"

of the things you list, the school schedule is the most hard and fast thing. for everything else you mention, you're presented with a window where so long as you can make _some_ time within that window you're fine. is shifting the window an hour in either direction really all that consequential? already there's enough variance in typical day jobs and eating habits that you and i probably differ by an hour and are still able to make it to hospitals, courts, airports, etc.

do we adjust school start times today? yes: if you've ever experienced two schools consolidating, or just demographic shifts in the areas being served by a school, it's not uncommon for start times to change. so regardless of how we coordinate at the whole-society level, we'll still do more granular coordination at the workplace, school, and community levels. IMO that outermost layer of coordination really just needs to provide stability, with the more local layers coordinating the finer details. and for many of us, DST is perceived as disrupting that stability: it feels like more of a hindrance to coordination than an aid for it.

I know when school starts. Thats not my point. The DST want to force more light onto people when research is pretty clear we need less (although we need more sunlight, ironically)

Solution:

They wake up an hour earlier, go for a jog, have a cigarette outside, whatever, and then join the rest of society at our regularly scheduled time.

[delayed]

Not if they’re working.

Or have kids in school.

Some of us have jobs with inflexible hours.

True. And some even have extremely inconvenient hours changing many days a weak. Think of long distance pilots, hospital doctors, and many low paid service jobs. My wife has them and I can see the effects on her health. So I find it ridiculous that every year there are big articles about this one hour twice a year, while other have to damage their health many basically 11 months a year (assuming 4 weeks of consecutive vacation we at least get in here Europe)

I'm not sure that you can make that argument fairly. Shift, on-call, across-time-zones (etc) workers have a job with a recognized hazard which is fully known at the time of acceptance. If your wife did not want to deal with such a schedule then another career should have been chosen, and if she is suffering health effects now then there should be options for disability leave or transfer to a different set of responsibilities. If this is not available I would advocate for it -- but her suffering is not a reason to shift the time scale of the rest of society against their will and to their detriment. Let's do less harm to fewer people and not use some people being harmed to justify doing it to more of them.

Sure, and we should definitely reform those jobs as well. Part of why there's a shortage of medical professionals is due to the insistence on putting them through terrible hours.

That’s an incredibly out of touch, privileged reply.

My kid's school isn't so accommodating.

Correct, most can’t.

It still fucks my mind, my whole time feeling / inner clock gets messed up even thought it doesn't matter how late it is for me, just the knowledge of the current time that doesn't fit my inner calculation is bad, gives me a unwell feeling and feeds into my depression. It makes me feel out of touch with reality if that makes sense.

Honestly it was less intensive when I still had a regular job, the fixed daily structures that didn't fit my inner clock anyway kinda masked that issue.

Where I live, we are extremely privileged in this respect - being at the western edge of a timezone that stretches further than its "natural" length, we even get sunsets past 22 in June. And you know what, it rocks. I see no significant drawbacks. During much of the year it's dark when we go to work, so what? For most people work is in offices with artificial lighting, leisure time is when you need the sun. Some people also talk about problems for kids but mine (4 year old) has no discernable problems to get up (given regular routine enforcement) and he loves being in the playground until dinner time, for which evening sun helps.

The funny thing is that some people strongly advocate changing timezone to advance the clock 1 hour, saying that we are in the "wrong" one, it's not "natural", etc. But then you talk with them and many of them are confused about how it would work and think that the timezone change would give more evening sun in the winter. Explaining that it would do the opposite brings looks of terror.

Of course there is a minority of people who do support that change knowing the practical consequences, but it seems to be a rather small minority.

Whereabouts are you?

In the region of Galicia, northwestern Spain.

Meanwhile I'm on the eastern edge of a timzeone that arguably stretches further than its "natural" length. I remember moving here as a kid and being pissed off when it'd be dark at 16h.

I'd be all for us being permanent DST but as that's not allowed it'd be great if we could shift a timezone and stay standard time

I think your math is wrong on this. Advancing the clock one hour (e.g., by making DST permanent) would indeed give more evening sun in the winter.

My way of dealing with it is to get up before sunrise to maximize the daylight hours. Then it doesn't seem so bad to me.

For me standard (9-5) work hours are dometimrd the problem. I can't do the same leisure things in an hour before work vs an hour after work because I still in the first I will have to go to work after so no drinking, getting high or relaxing without a thought of "work" coming up soon. As long as I can work earlier and leave earlier i'm good though. We just need more flexible work schedules in general.

That’s the actual, correct time for sunset in your latitude.

Don’t like it? Move further south.

With apologies to Douglas Adams… Time is an illusion. Sunset time doubly so.

We already pick arbitrary times for sunset twice a year. Nobody has to move anywhere to pick one arbitrary time for sunset and leave it that way. There’s nothing inherently “correct” about setting the time based on where the sun is positioned in the sky at “noon”, sometimes, from certain arbitrary points of observation.

Sunset isn't arbitrary, Its defined as the time the sun transitions below the horizon of your location. Its time varies based on where you are on earth and where the earth is in relation to the sun, but its not arbitrary.

That’s not what I said was arbitrary. The time we assign to it is arbitrary. It already is arbitrary, there isn’t any “correct” time of day to assign to it at any location. To the extent assigning a time at all serves a particular purpose, it’s a social purpose, and its assignment should be based on that.

Don't like it? Uproot your life and family, potentially switch jobs, leave behind your friends, all so you can solve an artificially-created problem that I have arbitrarily decided is actual and correct!

… my darkest day is similar — sunset will be at 1611 — so this sounds like similar latitudes.

But … assuming lunch is at roughly noon or so, that's just barely past solar noon, not "the fading light of the late afternoon"…

lots of people have lunch at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and it does feel that way in the winter

Lunch in UK, 12 o’clock sharp!

Lunch in Spain 2pm-3pm

Back when I'd commute a long distance to work (in NYC), it was so demoralizing to be in a 4PM meeting, it be DARK outside, and know I still had the whole trip back.

Remote work has largely fixed that aspect for me at least.

I, in contrast, deeply and utterly despise getting up before dawn.