Highly educated, longest living, least depressed.
And the sun is out at midnight 76 days per year there.
Humans are adaptable. A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.
But this is false equivalence as it's studying a different thing. Also it is very difficult to compare mental health studies across countries and attribute differences to single causes as there are so many confounding factors. In Norway there is a good standard of living, a social safety net, cheap healthcare and many other factors that are proven to be beneficial to mental health.
Humans are adaptable but sometime I think it's more accurate to say that humans tolerate different environments. We often don't adapt to them, we cope with them.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici... [2] https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/147...
If you ask actual scientists who research this topic, you get a different answer:
"The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
So, permanent standard time is better than switching, but switching is better than permanent summer time.
An actual example of this is Spain, which since WWII has been on the central European time zone, even though it is in Western Europe. According to this article, people in Spain should have more health problems and shorter lifespans, because their social clock is so much earlier than their body clocks. However as everyone who has ever been to Spain knows, the social clock in Spain does not have the same relationship to the wall clock as it does in other countries. In fact, relative to say the US, the social clock in Spain seems to be shifted a good two hours, for example with dinner at 9pm or 10pm. That seems like a very late hour for dinner, but relative to the sun that's more like 8pm.
If you already know what outcome you want it's easy to assemble evidence that supports that position, but it's not science, and this article is one of the best examples of that I've ever seen.
The paper is about the best option: "the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently".
My point was that daylight isn't guaranteed to send a country into disarray as OP seems to imply.
That's just an argument for a good social security system and says nothing about DST
1. Comparing the US (or any other country) to Norway is not valid because there are so many confounding variables. For one, Norway sinks in oil money and uses that money extensively to fund great social welfare programs.
2. What matters is relative within a country, not between country. The US had the choice between two time zones, and that's the question at stake here (not how the US compares to other countries, or how other countries deal with short day light periods).
(I'm a citizen of Norway)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-swf/norway-says-ma...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/norway-raises-2022-spen...
You can't tell me that a society that burns, on average, five and a half hours daily on useless, mindless activities like television, sportsball, and social media is going to be even mildly perturbed by this. There's plenty of slack in the average person's schedule to move things around.
Compared to what? Anytime I speak to any Norwegian/Swede, they tell me how depression during winter is so widespread basically everybody suffers in one way or another. People in Norway, Sweden, Finland etc go into household lightning overdrive to help this a bit, but real sun is real sun.
Single most important reason why I never moved there, even above short summer.
Source please?
But Portugal, a sun-rich country which sits East of its timezone, gets the top spot. So, go figure.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...
If this was true, seasonal affective disorder would occur in the summer and not the winter, don't you think?
And our ancient ancestors didn't evolve where it is dark. Nor did we evolve where the length of day changes much at all.
The fact that short days and darkness cause so many people problems in the winter tells me that amount of sunlight really matters to us.
And generally speaking, more is better, to an extent.
For the greatest part of our history we've spent our time outside, not sitting in artificial caves with artificial lights, hiding from the sun. If you want something that tells you why the sun is so important, take this instead.
If that doesn't work for you, remember that having enough exposure to the sun is vital for your body to function properly, both mentally and physically. We'd not be producing "Vitamin D" by being exposed for some time, if the sun wasn't an important factor in our existence.