At the British royal family's private Norfolk estate, Sandringhan House, it was once the custom to set the clocks half an hour ahead - in order to provide more afternoon daylight for shooting! (This "Sandringham Time" was abolished by that iconoclastic modernizer, Edward VIII, in 1936.) Of course, the amount of daylight on any given day at any particular time of year is dictated by the sun, not by a clock, let alone by our manipulation of the clock. Playing games with the clock is a time-honored self-deception, however, first proposed by Benjamin Franklin (ostensibly to save on candles), now practiced annually in the U.S. every April ("Spring forward!") and corrected every autumn on the first Sunday of November ("Fall behind!"). The system of summer "Daylight Saving Time" was codified in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Since then, the beginning and end of "Daylight Saving Time" have been expanded slightly at each end, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As that title suggests, that expansion of the "Daylight Saving Time" section of the year has often been defended as an energy-saving measure - in other words, as a politically evasive alternative to adopting any actual energy policy.
Admittedly, "Daylight Saving Time" has its partisans. Congress has repeatedly debated proposals to make "Daylight Saving Time" permanent nationwide, like the Sunshine Protection Act which passed the House in July 2026. Thankfully, however, the bill was stalled in the Senate. So, the traditional twice-a-year clock change remains legally required for now. (Some also assert that the one-hour time change is dangerous to people's health. Yet, thousands of people everyday fly across one or more time zones and change their watches one or more hours without noticeable health harms!)
Despite the way it is obsessively presented, "Daylight Saving Time" does not give us an extra hour of daylight, as is so often alleged. It just reallocates the existing amount of daylight, giving us darker mornings and brighter evenings - fine for wealthy golfers but not so fine for farmers who rise for work early and schoolchildren who have to wait for the bus in dangerously dark streets. Modern society has in so many ways de-linked us from nature and our natural biological rhythms. "Daylight Saving Time" just makes it that much worse, a further de-linking of our official, social, civilizational time from natural time.
Obviously we cannot live our complicated modern lives without some standardizing of time. What is called "Standard Time," to which we will return at 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning, remains realistically the closest availably approximation to "natural" time and to the biological rhythms that are part of who we are as human beings.
"Daylight Saving Time" was invented in an era when humans hoped to transcend biology and to leave the constraints of the natural world behind as much as possible. That is still the unofficial ideology of modernity. Meanwhile, however, nature has begun to exact her revenge. The continuity of human civilization now requires renegotiating that relationship in a way which better respects natural limits on human hubris. Recalibrating our clocks to stay closer to natural time will not correct climate change nor solve any of our other pressing political problems. It is, however, one very modest and imperfect but still symbolic step in that direction.
In Saint Ambrose's hymn Aeterne rerum conditor, one of the hymns assigned to Sundays in the Liturgy of the Hours, we sing, You give the seasons of the year To take time's heaviness away. Rather than lament less afternoon daylight to play golf or go shopping, we would do better to learn to embrace the winter dark, with its implicit invitation to slow down and adopt a more contemplative stance to time as the planet presents it to us.
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