“We’re high and dry and out of danger. Now what we don’t need is more surprises, right?” — Sylvester Stallone
Imagine that line as the moment your wall-clock jumps ahead one hour, your sleep disappears, and your entire productivity pipeline goes off the rails. That’s exactly what happens every time we observe Daylight Saving Time — the false sense of “we’re high and dry and out of danger,” only to be blindsided by a ripple of disruption.
Let’s Abolish Daylight Saving Time
The reason we still drag ourselves through the semi-annual ritual of changing clocks is that Congress has never passed a decisive bill to end this folly. Instead, we’re stuck in a loop of “spring forward, fall back” that just adds stress, wrecks routines, undermines competitiveness, and — spoiler alert — never truly served the people it claimed to.
Let’s call it what it is: a progressive-sounding idea that never delivered; not for farmers, not for energy savings, not for the planet.
Benjamin Franklin did not invent Daylight Saving Time. “Savings” is not even plural. In the Southern Hemisphere the rule is reversed. So when we’re doing this after decades of real-world evidence showing harm, the only reasons left are apathy or deliberate political inertia to keep things confusing and disempowering.
How Is This Still a Thing?
No one—no one—can give you a persuasive answer for why DST remains in force. What you sacrifice in lost sleep, you might gain in existential risk—or vice versa. Even the Germans have declared it nonsense. If it doesn’t improve health or conserve energy, why do we do it at all?
Throw in tech chaos: computers and real-world systems don’t handle the switch neatly. Certificates expire at midnight; login times mis-align; legacy apps freeze. It’s the modern equivalent of the dreaded Y2K bug.
Daylight Savings by the Numbers
- If you’re interrupted for one minute at work, it generally takes ~15 minutes to refocus.
- So if the entire American workforce is thrown off by one lost hour, that’s 15×60 = 900 lost hours of productivity.
- By the time you’re back in rhythm, guess what? It’s time to change the clocks again.
- Meanwhile: systems don’t update automatically, breach windows widen, user frustration spikes.
Contact Your Congressmen to Abolish Daylight Savings
This is a commonsense issue and doesn’t have anything to do with political beliefs. At Congress.gov, you can call, write, e-mail, and even Tweet your local senators or representatives. I’d like to say that by the next time Daylight Savings Time rolls around, this will just be an amusing historic relic. Unfortunately, it may just be a repeat reminder if we all don’t think through this problem together.
Because here’s the reality: we’re not just in a tunnel of confusion. We’re in danger of letting a legacy of misguided policy trap us underground, where light seems distant and every turn of the dial is another hurdle. Remember Kit Latura (Sylvester Stallone) in “Daylight”: when the roof caves in, the time bomb ticks, and the rescue depends on action, not just hope.
So, let’s step out into the light — permanently. Let’s ditch DST and reclaim our rhythm, our productivity, and our daylight. The exit is in sight. It’s time to pull the trigger.