Here we go again; another year, another fall, and another change of time. We are moving the clocks back one hour, even though the provincial government passed the legislation to end time changes two years ago.
More than 93 per cent of respondents to a 2019 B.C. government survey were on board with scrapping the twice-a-year time change and making daylight time permanent. And still, nothing happened.
DST was first introduced on April 30, 1916. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary moved the clocks forward in the spring to conserve coal during World War I. Although, the idea of changing the time to conserve either coal or candles was not new: it was first thought of as early as in the 18th century. Many countries have used DST at various times since then.
We don’t use candles or coal anymore as the main source of energy. Numerous studies indicated that the energy saving with DST is minimal if any. It may cause however more stress, fatigue, even illness, and increased traffic accidents in the first week of time change. And, for some unexplained reason, we are still holding on to the old idea and justify it with more or less imaginative explanations.
And what is time anyway? Physicists define time as “the progression of events from the past to the present into the future. … Time can be considered to be the fourth dimension of reality, used to describe events in three-dimensional space. It is not something we can see, touch, or taste, but we can measure its passage.” Einstein proved that time is relative, therefore it doesn’t really exist. According to Britannica,” time is a measured or measurable period, a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions. Time is of philosophical interest and is also the subject of mathematical and scientific investigation”.
So, the DST or standard time is just a social construct, a rule we as a society agreed upon to make it easier for us to function. Similar to other social constructs like the role of a woman, human rights, family values, money, etc. Why are we insisting on keeping something that doesn’t serve us anymore or doesn’t make our life easier?
I don’t know the answer. But, the situation makes me think again how often we keep to old rules and ideas that govern our lives just because they exist. How often we follow them blindly without questioning why they were introduced in the first place, and what their roles were. We accept that women have to be slim, pretty and quiet, that men don’t show emotions, that a family consists of a husband, a wife and children, that the Ten Commandments were given to us by God and have to be observed, that our religion is better than anybody else’s. Really?
Think about some of your family rules; things you never talk about, some expectations you always fulfill without even knowing why, family traditions nobody remembers the origin of. They might have made sense years and years ago in different circumstances, but don’t serve you anymore. And yet you still practice them, because “those are the rules”!
Rather than thinking of what you want and what makes sense to you, you hold on to dead people’s ideas that make you miserable, confined, or confused.
Even more; quite often you spend a lot of energy justifying your commitment to the rules that don’t make sense rather than looking into your own needs and wants.
I am not saying that there is no place for tradition or social rules. There definitely is. As long as you know why you are listening to dead people’s norms and whether they are or not still relevant to your values and needs. If the answer is no, maybe it is time to change the rules, not yourself.
By Eva Sadowski Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
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