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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, for teenagers it's a separate issue, which should be fixed simply by changing the start times for high schools to be a couple of hours later. It shouldn't be confused with the DST issue.

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.

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> 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.

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.

> but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do

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.

> 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.

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.

> They could go to sleep earlier Friday evening and have more sun.

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! :)

> 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.

That's... not how we work at all.

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.

Unfortunately teenager and adult hours are forced to be synchronised, so schools just cannot open later.

> Unfortunately teenager and adult hours are forced to be synchronised,

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.

A lot of people are comfortable with children coming home from school a couple hours before their parents get home. Many of those people are much less comfortable with children waking up and going to school a couple hours after their parents leave for work.

It sounds like you're saying that since we can trust teenagers to get themselves home from school at all, it follows that we can also trust teenagers to get themselves to school from home on time. I don't think this logic works for all teenagers, even with a later school start time.

I have been doing this since age 13, so I see no problem assuming decent transportation links to take advantage of.

I think the point is more, teenagers are more motivated to leave school and go home than to leave home and go to school.

That's the teenagers' problem. At the age of 13, it's about time to know that you can hate doing something, and yet still have to do it because it's your responsibility and because you will have problems if you ignore it (just like in adult life).

Even if you are right, adults and teenagers still sync around dinner time, they still sync around social activities, etc.

One of the main purposes of school is child care, as we've observed through this pandemic, so schools must open when most adults go to work.

> One of the main purposes of school is child care, as we’ve observed through this pandemic, so schools must open when most adults go to work.

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.

you may be biased by your 9-5 job, but a lot of people work first shift, 7-3. i don't have any numbers to back it up, but since you made the claim do you mind?

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