Who Saves Time by Daylight Saving Time?

And so, winter has officially come to visit us again. Its dark reign ascends until the new year, whence its icy grip will slowly loosen. The sun-god Re will make progressively less impressive treks across our sky until his paltry appearances will not bring awe to even the most impressionable. Like everything else in nature, it is not something that cannot be made worse by human artifice. I speak now, explicitly, of daylight saving time (or daylight's savings's time as we say here in Ireland). We feign control over time every six months by moving the hands of our chronometers back or forth. It is a concept utterly bereft of logic and utility. I once spent twenty bemused minutes trying to explain it to a Korean colleague, who may well have thought me a liar or an idiot. 

Resistance is futile. 

We have all heard the stories of why daylight saving exists: the farmer needed the extra hour with his sons before school in the morning to ensure he could get all the work done before sundown (or some such variation of this idea). Aside from daylight saving being redundant now, in this time of hydroponics, flood lights, and advanced farming machinery, it has allowed the greatest scourge ever to visit mankind to endure for millennia: farming itself. Yes, dear reader, I attest to the inescapable reality that farming has held us back, leading us away from the righteous paleo diet we were always supposed to have. The ultra-ancient wisdom of our pre-historic ancestors has been lost. Were they able to transmit their insights into the future in a more reliable form than the primordial grunts they used as language, they would have undoubtedly educated us on the value of ketosis, foraging, and the many ills of dairy and gluten. Instead, their beautiful knowledge and lifestyle were paved over by the mammoth terror we now call agriculture. 

Like a plague of organised, productive locusts, agrarian societies supplanted the bounty of nature with the toilsome utilitarianism of farming. These harbingers of obesity and diabetes poisoned humanity with wheat, barley, and animal produce. How many barely discernible, minor allergies and intolerances do we have to witness to acknowledge that farming is a curse? And what has farming actually brought us? Obesity? Societies crammed with far too many bodies? How many fat people filing up crowded places do we need to experience before we realise that foraging for nuts and berries is the pinnacle of humanity? We can no longer afford to deny our very particular dietary needs. I say that if you wish to uncover the roots of our dystopia, look no further than the roots of our dyspepsia. Throwing shit we gather from animals asses unto the tossed and turned soil has produced the results you would expect from such activities. Prior to the Neolithic Revolution, we stood over 190cm tall and usually lived for over a century. Now we look shrivelled and pale in comparison, unable to breeze through daily ultra-marathons like our pre-historic ancestors did. 

The darkness descends once more and we believe we can mitigate it with artifice. We need, as humans, to put down the foolish slice of bread and the bowl of rice hubris. Nature stands immutable; in the power scheme, we are not the ones in control. Only when we accept the light of this truth can we hope for a brighter day. 

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