Our system was originally based on noon, not midnight.
I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June.
> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun.
I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock.
Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environment and forced ourselves onto arbitrary schedules most of us have a completely screwed sense of time.
If you flex your day based on sunrise, you get more useful sunlight hours... which means more time for being outside enjoying the day instead of stuck indoors. It's also a lot easier to get moving based on natural light, our bodies are programmed for it much like they are programmed for a 24 hour day.
The big issue with daylight savings time is the loss of sleep due to it all happening at once. You don't have that issue if you just have an alarm that wakes you at sunrise.
That might be the case somewhere that doesn't have wide variations in day/night lengths throughout the year - but I definitely do not rise naturally at 4am in summer and 9am in winter. I've spent plenty of time outdoors as well.
After decades of using an alarm clock and sleeping in a dark room, a few years ago I began going to bed consistently around 10pm and allowing natural light to wake me up. It has really improved the quality of my sleep and my feeling of restedness in the morning.
Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work.
I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.
> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.
For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm
I remember being quite surprised when I noticed (while I was actually in San Francisco) that its about the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. So you are talking about almost all of Europe.
Well, depends a bit on where. I live at 69 degrees northern latitude, with a 2 month polar night/day in winter/summer - all this talk of DST and schedules following the sun seems a bit silly from up here (and we do have forced DST in Norway - although I hope we'll drop it).
An interesting counter point: in summer it's quite easy to drift into a pattern of following the weather -sometimes day will be overcast/rainy, nights clear and sunny. On vacation/camping you can sometimes flip the day to night in summer.
Absolutely. DST makes no sense at your latitude, where rising with the sun isn’t always possible.
A long camping trip during the polar day would be sooo weird! I’ve only been to Reykjavik in the late summer, and it was hard for me to get enough sleep.
Has anyone started a Northern mystery novel with “It was a clear and sunny night...”?? ;)
I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.
You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June.
Seems worse than even daylight savings time.