Daylight Saving Time

In the summer, the morning sun rises much earlier than in the winter. Even at five in the morning while most people are still fast asleep, daylight is already streaming through the window. Letting all that early sunlight go to waste while sleeping feels like a missed opportunity.

So when spring arrives, entire countries make a shared agreement to push clocks forward by one hour. What was once 6:00 AM suddenly becomes 7:00 AM. People feel like they are waking up at their usual time, but they are actually starting their day an hour earlier.

Thanks to this shift, the sky stays bright long after school or work ends. With extended daylight, households do not need to turn on lights as early, and people get extra sunshine to enjoy outdoor workouts and leisure activities.

Historically, this system was first popularized during World War I to conserve coal and fuel. Governments believed that cutting back on evening candles and light bulbs would substantially save national energy supplies.

In modern times, however, things have changed dramatically. With sunnier and warmer evenings, air conditioning usage has actually surged. Numerous studies show that the extra electricity consumed for cooling often cancels out or outweighs the energy saved on lighting, yielding little net benefit.

There is also a significant toll on our biological clocks. Losing an hour overnight disrupts sleep rhythms and causes fatigue akin to jet lag. In fact, statistics reveal temporary spikes in traffic accidents and cardiovascular issues during the week immediately following the spring shift.

Countries near the equator experience nearly equal day and night all year round, so they have little reason to use Daylight Saving Time. In contrast, higher-latitude regions across Europe and North America have huge differences between summer and winter daylight, which led them to stick with the system for decades.

Yet resetting clocks twice a year creates major friction. Flight schedules get disrupted, and software systems suffer glitches. For global financial markets and logistics networks, managing the constant time changes has become a massive hidden cost.

Because of these issues, the European Parliament voted in 2019 to end seasonal time changes, though member states have yet to finalize an agreement. In the United States, several states are pushing to adopt permanent daylight saving time year-round. South Korea also experimented with DST around the founding of its government until around 1960, and again from 1987 to 1988 around the Seoul Olympics, but abolished it due to public confusion and pushback.