Nobody Knows What Time it Is: Seasonal Time Change Confusion
If you live somewhere that goes through seasonal clock changes, you likely complain about it. (I do and I do.)
If you work or have friends and family across the globe, though—even if you don’t go through seasonal clock changes—you likely still complain.
You can probably guess the reason:
Even if your part of the world doesn’t change the time twice a year—and, in fact, most places in the world do not—several parts of the world still do.
Which means, if you have friends, family, coworkers, clients, or whomever in places that go through time changes, you never know what the heck time it is wherever they are without looking it up.
The confusion compounds when you realize that different parts of the world change time at different moments each year. For example, the countries on the European continent that change clocks don’t change them on the same date as the United States does.
People Prefer Not to Change Time
From a quick scan of what I could find about worldwide sentiment over seasonal time changes, people everywhere would prefer that the time stop changing. (No surprise, at least to me. I’ve never met anyone who likes it.)
For two specific examples, let’s look at one from my country of origin and one from the region where I now live. Public sentiment over twice-annual time changes is so negative in each place that both governments took action.
In the United States in early 2022, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to elect permanent Daylight Savings Time. In the European Union, citizens overwhelmingly voted to end the seasonal time change in 2018.
Bad Habits are Hard to Change
However, changing habits is hard, especially when said habits don’t have as much weight as a lot of other issues on government plates.
The US Senate may have passed the Sunshine Protection Act to keep Daylight Savings Time year-round in 2022, but the House never took up the bill to carry it forward and make it law. Members of the House have cited higher priorities elsewhere. The bill rests on the table for now.
In Europe, even though EU citizens made their decision back in 2018, member countries hadn’t yet chosen whether to keep Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time permanently when COVID hit in 2020, delaying the decision. Since that time, other issues have taken priority in the EU as well. When the time-change question will come back to the table is an open one.
Does Anybody Know What Time it Is?
A further possible future complexity: In the pre-COVID days, the European Union announced that it would let each member country choose its preferred time (Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time) and stick to it throughout the year.
This decision is reminiscent of how the United States allowed each state to decide whether to seasonally change its clocks. (Today, all US states change time other than Hawaii and Arizona. The Navaho Nation does not seasonally change the hour, either.)
Different states in the same general global longitude having different clock time is chaotic. Just the thought of Europe going in this direction gives me flashbacks to when Indiana didn’t change time twice a year and the places where I lived did. (Indiana gave into seasonal time changes in 2006.) I never knew without checking whether I was calling Grandma too early or too late.
Time Zones as a Construct
Before the adoption of official time zones, each town set its own time. When you arrived somewhere, you synced your watch with someone else’s watch or with the clock on the town’s tower or church or train station and you got on with it. You’d change your watch again when you went somewhere else.
In the 1878, a Canadian named Sir Sandford Fleming developed a system of international time zones, dividing the globe longitudinally into twenty-four longitudinal strips. Because people across the world had, by that time, started to move around geographically more often and more quickly, a need to coordinate had become pressing. It’s hard to schedule train times and shipping schedules and all the rest otherwise. So only a few years after Fleming came up with the idea, the International Prime Meridian Conference met to agree on parameters and make it official.
So even if we can’t be thankful for seasonal time changes, we can at least be thankful for time zones. Can you imagine scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the globe, as we do today, without them?