Silly traditions
Once I again I want to chime in on the uselessness of tradition. And in this case, not only the uselessness, but the actual net negative that comes from getting set in our ways. In the United States, we have this idiotic tradition known as Daylight Savings Time.
The tradition works like this: twice every year we screw with everyone’s sleep schedule by tampering with the clocks. We move the time either an hour ahead or an hour behind, depending on the season, so as to maximize the light in the morning. Now that I live in a country that doesn’t do this, it makes me rather happy, because I always loathed this twice yearly inconvenience. Now it seems the time change’s downside exceeds mere annoyance: it’s killing people.
Now, people die for all sorts of reasons, some of them positively mind-blowing in their stupidity, and people dying isn’t automatically, in an of itself, a reason to ban something, but this recent study shows that right after the fall daylight savings time switch, pedestrian deaths occur at thrice the rate for other times of the year. Just in case the poor quality of my English obscured the important bit, i’ll put it in numbers: 300% more pedestrians than normal die in car accidents right after the time switch.
Of course, this is perfectly logical; during the time change, people miss appointments, are late with work, etc. and so on. People are just not good at handling rapid change, favoring instead gradual change. So it’s no surprise that drivers make more mistakes during these periods, as the patterns they are normally navigating through have changed, however subtly, causing their muscle memory to fight with the new reality, and occasionally fail.
There are arguments for daylight savings time, which seem to me like mostly red herrings: energy savings, safety for children in the morning. But the energy savings is just transferred from one end of the day to the other, while the safety issue is probably made worse: streets are busier at dusk than they are at dawn.
No, it’s my belief that society clings to (and, in fact, even legislates) this idiotic behavior for one main reason: tradition. People have been doing it so long they’ve forgotten what life would be without it. But, in my humble opinion, the fact that you’ve done something for 100 years has fuck all to do with whether you should continue doing it or not.