DST is Stupid

Folks, if you’re anything like me, when you set your clock on Sunday to suddenly be a different hour than it was just a minute ago, you thought to yourself, “This is stupid.”

Daylight Savings Time is one of man’s stupider inventions, ranking up there with Deal or No Deal, and, more specifically, Howie Mandel.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tortured someone, but one effective way to do it is to present someone with a truth, and tell them that the truth they perceive is false. You keep telling them that again and again, until they break and admit that your lie is the truth. Then, for more fun, you tell them their original truth was the truth. This is the sum total of Daylight Savings Time.

“What time is it?” should be a simple question, but it isn’t these days, is it? With all the variability of our lives, even the time isn’t something we can rely on. I won’t get into the history of DST, but basically it was invented so that there would be a greater chance that you would go to Macy’s after work. I heard as a child that the reason was because it saved energy. It doesn’t. And by and large, DST costs more money than doing without, and when we increased DST last year, it cost North America a ton o’ cash, in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, basically, if someone wanted to just have something be a huge economic drain and be psychologically and physiologically upsetting to the masses with little or no benefit, one could not invent something better than Daylight Savings Time. Maybe if everyone was visited by a social worker every morning who hit them with a rubber mallet, then that would possibly be a stupider, more pointless exercise than DST. Possibly. And one might actually have to make sure that the social worker visited at random times throughout the day. And that they perhaps insulted you at the same time.

“Jeez, Dr. Matt,” you’re probably saying, “you sure sound grumpy about this.” Well, if your not-cheap-but-crappy alarm clock was playing “Walk Like an Egyptian” right now, an hour earlier than it should, wouldn’t you be grumpy too? I mean, why the heck should I walk like an Egyptian? Why, I ask you, why?

You don’t know? Neither do I. Whose fault is that? Daylight Savings Time.

Just My Thoughts,
Dr. Matt*

* Dr. Matt is not a real doctor.