Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app.
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.
I think that DST is not such an ugly hack. Think of it as a mass coordination problem. You want to start work every day 1-2 hours after the sun rises. Fine, but in this time system, it's a different time in every point on earth, and it's complicated to convert between them. If you want to schedule a phone call, you're going to have to use a computer to figure out what two equivalent times are. Times are meaningless unless a precise location is also specified.
A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out.
DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is.
DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.
DST wouldn't be so bad if everything didn't need to be heavily synchronized alongside a 9-to-5 mentality. Time is useful for synchronization, but just the fact many people chastise night owls while applauding early birds, as well as emphasizing the "when" instead of the "how many hours did you do N" (or better: "how much N did you achieve"), puts many people who are dependent on more light to start their day in a weird spot.
That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be.
Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.
Please stop the whine for people who are late stay ups. It am social okay for scheduling event at late night. Dinner am late night. Nightclub am late night. All these things are being late night and social okay. No such for early morning, we are expect for stay up late to make these thing, late sleep people only have awaken for 9:00 o clock morning zoom connect.
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...”?? ;)
Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. Also, sunrise and sunset are always symmetrical to noon, even when the day length varies considerably. For setting up a time system, noon consequentially is the correct reference point. But yes, your day rhythm will vary relative to that across the year, but there will differences according to local (like latitude) and personal environments which will make sunrise not a good reference point for a time system.
> Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart.
DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.
IIRC our system of time is more so aligned with midday rather than midnight. As that is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, which allowed us to create a common point between timezones.
The problem would be that everyone would have a different time depending on where they are on the globe, not only different hour but also minute. That would make things like meetings between people living in slightly different places very difficult. Timezones are needed by the modern organization of society, and I guess that organization is not necessarily very friendly with human needs.
IIRC, this is also how time is kept in some equatorial regions, as their days are consistently the same length year-round. Starting one 12 hour cycle at daybreak and another at sunset made the most sense.
a thousand years ago in Scandinavia the new day would start at 6pm, effectively at sunset, which is also why Christmas in Scandinavia is on the evening of the 24th instead of the 25th in the morning.
Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.
It would be a bit of a nightmare for makers of mechanical clocks. For nearly everyone else if their clocks automatically handled it, I can't think of many people that would notice that the interval from a given time one day to the same time the next day varies slightly from day to day.
I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.
Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.
There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.
Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.