April 8, 2022

 Editor: Jessica Isser
Artist: Emily Veguilla

When faced with the possibility of never falling back again, I’ve started to wonder what that could mean for me and my concept of time. 

A bit of context: the United States Senate has recently passed what they’re calling the Sunshine Protection Act, a proposal to make daylight savings time permanent starting in 2023. In March of next year, we will collectively “spring forward” and stay there, never to set our clocks back again. While the bill is currently stagnant in the House, people throughout the country have started to consider the implications of this change if it does come into fruition.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve never considered a world without a biannual time shift. It’s just the way it is. You also don’t know why we do it; you’re just happy to get an extra hour of sleep on a seemingly random Saturday night in the fall and extremely disappointed to lose it six months later. So what is daylight saving time, and why do we have it? According to an article from ZME Science, the idea was first conceptualized in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson, a scientist from New Zealand. Despite public interest in the concept, it wasn’t materialized until 1916 at the start of World War 1, when Germany utilized the time shift to save coal. Many countries followed suit soon thereafter, and since then, daylight savings has been heavily debated and has had a pretty checkered history. While many countries have repealed daylight savings time altogether, the United States is taking steps to live in it indefinitely. This begs the question: what does that mean for us?

I’ve always joked that time is an illusion - made up by society: it's not real. Immanuel Kant, one of the great Enlightenment philosophers from Germany, for the most part agrees with me. Summarized in an article by Janet Cameron, a philosophy professor from the University of Kent, his theories suggest that time is intuitive and that it is nothing more than a materialized form of what humans already have internalized. Time is a necessary foundation on which all of our actions and the phenomena of the world are dependent. It cannot exist nor be destroyed - it’s a concept within us all - and yet our notions of different times existing are actually one and the same.

We then have the concept of an internal clock. Scholars and sleep experts are among the first to claim that our bodies have a biological clock that alerts us when to do things. Does this clock move back and forth with societal time changes? Does our body’s natural rhythm change when daylight savings time does? These answers are yet to be discovered and have become the topic of research for many contemplating the ramifications of implementing such an idea.

All of these theoreticals and yet we arrive at the same fundamental question. What does this really mean for us?

In the words of Kant, time is a “pure form of the sensuous intuition” (Cameron). It does not actually exist. WE create it. Pondering the idea of a permanent daylight savings time, as well as ideas from great philosophers such as Kant, has made me reimagine the notion of time. If it’s something that can be reconstructed with something as simple as a vote, a passing of a bill, then why can we, as individuals, not reclaim it? If the existence of time comes from within our own bodies, our own consciousness, who is to say we can ever run out of it?

Sometimes my life feels like it’s passing me by - like the clock is ticking faster than I could ever keep up with. I am left forever wishing I could reach out and stop the minutes in their tracks. There is so much to do and so little time - or so I thought. 

The Sunshine Protection Act and its impending permanence has created many questions that are still to be answered, and yet, it has allowed me to come to one simple conclusion. The construct of time only exists within the bounds of our own realities, and it, therefore, has the potential to change. No longer restrained by the hands on the clock, I don’t have to be afraid of running out of moments or memories. Instead of longing and living merely for more time, I am making the time needed to truly live. And that change has made all the difference.

Sources:

Andrei, Mihai. “What Is Daylight Savings Time, How It Came to Be, and Why We Should Probably Get Rid of It.” ZME Science, 17 Mar. 2022, https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/daylight-savings-good-bad-28032018/. 

Cameron, Janet. “Immanuel Kant on Time – A Theory from the Heart.” Decoded Past, 6 Oct. 2013, https://decodedpast.com/immanuel-kant-time-theory-heart/.