(Though personally, I'd prefer it were a personal choice and not the random, sleep disrupting change that DST ends up being)
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.
For appointments and scheduling, using GMT makes sense. For any other reference, hours after local sunrise makes much more sense.
I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June.
Seems worse than even daylight savings time.
Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work.
I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.
Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.
I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock.
Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environment and forced ourselves onto arbitrary schedules most of us have a completely screwed sense of time.
If you flex your day based on sunrise, you get more useful sunlight hours... which means more time for being outside enjoying the day instead of stuck indoors. It's also a lot easier to get moving based on natural light, our bodies are programmed for it much like they are programmed for a 24 hour day.
The big issue with daylight savings time is the loss of sleep due to it all happening at once. You don't have that issue if you just have an alarm that wakes you at sunrise.
That might be the case somewhere that doesn't have wide variations in day/night lengths throughout the year - but I definitely do not rise naturally at 4am in summer and 9am in winter. I've spent plenty of time outdoors as well.
It is difficult to sleep with natural light. That doesn't mean we collapse to the ground when it gets dark.
As I said, we rise with the sun, and stay awake so long as it makes sense.
Ever been camping for more than a day or two? Rising by the sun happens pretty naturally and quickly.
Endless artificial light is a very recent invention. What do you think life was like before electricity?
An interesting counter point: in summer it's quite easy to drift into a pattern of following the weather -sometimes day will be overcast/rainy, nights clear and sunny. On vacation/camping you can sometimes flip the day to night in summer.
A long camping trip during the polar day would be sooo weird! I’ve only been to Reykjavik in the late summer, and it was hard for me to get enough sleep.
Has anyone started a Northern mystery novel with “It was a clear and sunny night...”?? ;)
A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out.
DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is.
DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.
That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be.
Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.
Sunrise is also gradual and long enough around the solstices to become quite arbitrary
DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.
Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.
Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.
There are expensive ones that do a really good job of blocking light, and inexpensive ones that let some light through.
Walmart's house brand, Mainstays, is the later. They block a decent amount of light, but some will get through.
I found that if you use blackout curtains with grommets, like the Mainstays [1], you can simply double them up. Set one panel on top of another with their grommets aligned, and you have a double blackout curtain. A pair of $10 Mainstay panels doubled work as well as the expensive ones which are way more than 2x$10 per panel.
If you need more than one panel (or pairs of doubled panels) side by side to cover your window, the grommets can help there too. Overlap them side by side by a couple grommets. You've now got effectively one wider panel.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-Blackout-Energy-Efficie...
When watching TV the bright reflections in the screen from that window can be quite annoying, especially during darker scenes. During parts of some days you can actually see a reflection of the sun itself in the TV screen, making it hard to see even bright scenes.
Most of June the sun rises from 4:30 to 4:50, and it's not until late august it rises around 6am again. Sunset is between 9pm and 10pm, civil twilight lasts until 3:42am, and the sun never goes below 12 degrees.
From November to February it doesn't rise until 8am. (and sets around 4pm, astronomical twilight around 6pm)
We have a large roof window that allows morning sunlight to enter our bedroom, and while my brain/body would probably benefit from following the natural daylight cycle, it has the shutters closed for most of the summer.
Nice mild weather with sane sunrise/sunset times all year round is definitely on the list of things I envy about the SF Bay Area.
It's mostly not about the middle of summer. We have fabulous long summer evenings. It's the interim months like right now, where I most miss having that extra time in the evening. I want long evenings every day possible.
(last solar event in small font) Sunset 19:17
(current date/time small) Mon 15 19:26
(relative time to next solar event in large) Dusk in 17
It tracks dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and dusk. It's pretty simple but has changed how I go about my day. I don't use an alarm to wake up, but I've learned that when it's 8 hours to dawn I should be getting in bed.
Business hours : 1 hour after sunrise until 10 hours after sunrise.
Even without that, many of us have flexible hours and can either start work earlier, or just do something before work when we have time. Waking up early in the summer means you can catch a bike ride or take a short run or hike before work. Since it's too hot in the afternoon/ evening this works quite well for much of the country.
For those who are just doing it on their own, I think DST actually helps them. The government creates a very rough movement following sunrise, and you can use personal adjustments to zero in on the exact sunrise time.
The time when sunrises changes both when travelling west to east and south to north... Not to even mention being beyond artic circle. Where sun never rises or sets at least on some days...
Would buy for $4.99.
I want an app that allows me to shift my schedule to the sun, not sync an artificial sun to my schedule.