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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

For folks with seasonal affective disorder, this makes winter even more hellacious.

Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.

Disagree. Having the sun set so early is far more depressing than it rising a little later in the winter. I'd rather have a 7am sunrise than a 4pm sunset.

This exactly. Having it still be bright out after your work day is so nice. When the sun has already set by the time you're leaving work, it feels like the day has already ended.

Sunlight after work is a nice-to-have. But for people who have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, darkness in the morning means a bad start to the day.

On the contrary, early sunset is little trouble but having to get out of bed when it seems like it's still the middle of the night is hell.

More people are awake at 5pm than at 7am though. Lots of people won't benefit from more sunlight that early in the morning, but almost everyone benefits from more sunlight in late afternoon / early evening.

> More people are awake at 5pm than at 7am though.

"More" perhaps, but probably not by that much? Schools start around 8, most people need to be in the office before 9, and so on. I don't know many people who are able to get up later than 7:30 or so, unless they work from home. And with permanent DST, the sun won't finish rising until after 8 am.

> the sun won't finish rising until after 8 am

This is only true for the northernmost reaches of the US on the darkest days of the year. Portland Maine will see sunrise at around 8:15 on the darkest day, Seattle will have it around 8:30. 99% of Americans will still wake up to sunrise year-round

I live in NYC, which is not that far north, and in the week before DST ends it's still quite dark as late as 7:40.

> I don't know many people who are able to get up later than 7:30 or so

I hardly know anyone who gets up regularly before 8am.

I have black-out curtains, so it looks like the middle of the night at high noon in my bedroom. A sun filled room while I'm trying to sleep would be my version of hell.

Where do you live that DST would make you wake up in the middle of the night? Even in Seattle twilight officially starts around 6:30am at the latest.

It feels like it when it's still dark.

Yeah, but in winter I get up when it's dark and it's dark again by the time I leave work. It's extremely depressing. At least with perma-DST (or BST as it would be here) I'd have some chance of a bit of daylight at the end of the day.

Is this based on your own experience dealing with SAD?

huh? For people that actually experience seasonal affective disorder, the damage is already done by 4pm, your day has already been ruined. People who actually deal with this typically use a SAD lamp first thing in the morning.

Same: I really struggle in winter and the biggest factor, by far, is that it gets dark so early.

I think for folks with any kind of seasonal affective disorder, having a fixed time on the clock year-round is still beneficial. Take more vacation in winter. Push for slightly more flexible work hours or at least a later first-meeting-of-the-day.

yeah if your employer gives shit. but there are millions of shift workers and they are at their employers mercy.

>Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.

Of course, you aren't getting that in either system; even in Standard time the sun doesn't actually rise in the early morning. You're still going to need the wake-up light either way.

With permanent DST, you'll actually get more of a chance to witness the sun in general, as there's a greater span of time that it'll be available for use when you're allowed outside at the end of the workday.

Up in the dark, home in the dark just flat out sucks for the 4 months of the year these conditions occur; minimizing the number of people who have to deal with that and minimizing the number of days they have to deal with that should be top priority.

Wouldn't quite a few people like this sleep through the sunrise and be happy to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day? I don't see how its any worse for the non-morning people in that group.

Not sure about the morning-person thing, but permanent DST would mean that on the shortest days the sun would rise at 9:18am rather than 8:18am. I'd rather the sun rise at 8:18am to help me wake up. I don't have kids, but if I did I'd rather them be walking to school during twilight rather than the pitch darkness of night.

Permanent standard time would have been much better. I live in Massachusetts. We have a lot of narrow roads with virtually no street lights. In the winter, it's common for snow or ice to accumulate. Having kids walking to a bus stop and waiting on the side of the road in the dark for the entire winter is a safety hazard.

You're even on the eastern end of the time zone, where the sunrise is comparatively early. There are bus stops in Indiana too.

Hard disagree on this one. Sunrises in Massachusetts are very early, the latest is about 7am for this time zone. Moving the time zone would push that to 8am. But it gets light substantially before sunrise — there’s a solid hour of twilight. You’re not sending your kids to school in the dead of night.

I don't know why you think I'm lying about this or what I stand to gain from doing so. It's not well-illuminated an hour before sunrise here.

There’s nothing to lie about. You’ve never sent your kids to school in all all-DST winter.

Huh? What does sending them to school in an "all-DST winter" matter? I've sent them to school during DST and then during EST. I know how dark it is before the switch over and after. We're not repositioning the earth.

The light is going to arrive at the same time regardless of whether you call that time 6am or 7am.

This will affect people in northern latitudes far more. For me it would be the matter of 8am vs 9am.

And the sun will set at 5pm instead of 4pm. So what? It's not changing the relative positions of the Earth and the Sun. There's going to be a certain amount of daylight at a given time of year no matter what. How we label the hours is irrelevant.

You are right, the concept of clock time is a social construct. But guess what, you're still expected to show up to work at the same time. Kids still show to school at the same time. How we label the time work starts may be irrelevant, but the time between sunrise, work starting, work ending, and sunset is absolutely not irrelevant.

Work and school are also social constructs and there's no reason we have to maintain some arbitrary start and end time. Why not start "1 hour after sunrise" instead of 9am? It would probably be healthier to tailor our activities to the presence of natural light instead of sticking to an artificial schedule.

This is my preferred outcome. Unfortunately change is hard, and coordination is even harder, so it's not going to happen. Permanent DST is the best realistic option.

One the biggest arguments for dumping the time switch is the difficulty caused by inconsistent switching between North America and Europe. That's a one hour change that everyone knows about well in advance. I'm not sure how those companies are supposed to coordinate anything if all meeting times are now relative to when the sun rises in each employee's location.

They are already relative to when the sun rises in each location. People generally try not to schedule meetings when it's going to be the middle of the night for the other party.

I'm not saying we should do away with the entire system of timekeeping. Just adjust work and school start/stop times to be better synced up with natural daylight.

Things being social constructs always seems to come with an unjustified claim that we’re morally required to get rid of them, as if we’re even capable of that.

Nobody is saying we're required to get rid of anything. It's just that if something is a social construct it means that we just made it up. So if there's a way to change it that works better, it's within our power to change it have it work better. We don't have to just live with the way it currently is. It's not like the gravitational constant or the speed of light or something that is outside human control.

Can’t we agree that time is nonsense, and changing the clocks is a nonsense topping on a nonsense salad?

> Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.

This reminds me of another conversation on HN about color sensitivity in human vision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

I imagine that waking up long after sunrise could affect our sensitivity to certain light spectrums to the point that "night owls" and "morning people" are seeing completely different colors, but calling them the same name.

In other words, two people who wake up early in the morning might both perceive a certain color of orange as "dark / muted", while people who wake up later in the day might perceive that same color of orange as "bright". On the opposite side of the spectrum, the color blue may appear more vibrant to people who wake up early, because their vision is bombarded with yellow (sunlight) in the morning.

Buy a wake-up light, then. We can’t force everyone to adapt to other people’s disorders.

Wake-up light doesn't work for everyone (e.g. me).

Not having affected by the light as much doesn't give anyone powers to tell others what to do.

Regardless of whether DST is implemented or not, you will be forcing someone to adapt to other people’s preferences.

That is not a very good argument.

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