Saturday Night Social: Daylight Savings Is Utterly Meaningless

Let’s immediately cut to the chase because we, as a whole hemisphere, are hurtling toward a horrible and inevitable fate: The sun is setting at 4:45 PM EST this Sunday evening. I’d have written night because that’s the scientific term for what happens when the sun disappears from the sky, but rebranding a time that should still be mid-day to night feels terrible. It’s daylight savings time yet again and so the clocks are moving in a different direction without real reason. I can’t quite put my finger on the reasoning but this year, daylight savings seems more oppressive than usual.

I’ll preface this by saying that I am currently living in the final year of my 20’s and everything, even the incredibly small things like daylight savings, now carry a particularly unique charge. Like the moon slowly creeping across the sky earlier and earlier, there is a proverbial clock ticking loudly somewhere over my head that I can’t control. Surely, it’s always been there, but now as I stand on the precipice of Real Adulthood, I can no longer ignore its presence.

In theory, daylight savings is utterly meaningless. The sun still rises when it rises and sets when it sets. It operates all on its own celestial calendar, giving not a single fuck to the puny humans on earth who bend over backward to fill time and mark its passing. Time itself is such an abstract concept that constantly invites new depths of philosophizing, especially pre- and post bong rip. Yet, we are all still beholden to this thing, this perpetual reminder of our mortality and our general insignificance.

So, on Sunday at 4:45 PM, the sun will start to set, and shortly thereafter it will be unseen on one half of the planet ushering in long periods of darkness and seasonal depression. More lunar rituals from the Instagram witches will ensue. Time will trudge on. The second year of living in a pandemic will end, a new one will begin. The world will march further down the road of no return as it slowly becomes uninhabitable for future generations. The Sunday Scaries will set in and people will gather around their screens to watch Succession. Fundamentally, nothing will have changed and yet everything will be different.

Anyway, don’t forget to turn your clocks back.