Life Without Standard Time

Standardizing time through permanent Daylight Saving Time creates a fundamental conflict between industrial efficiency and human biological rhythms. While shifting clocks forward offers potential economic benefits like reduced crime and increased social activity, it ignores the body's reliance on the light-dark cycle for regulating sleep, mood, and alertness. Dr. Aarti Jagannath highlights that artificial time shifts disrupt circadian rhythms, leading to increased health risks and mental health challenges, particularly for teenagers and shift workers. Simultaneously, historian Dr. Rebecca Struthers explains that our rigid, uniform timekeeping is a recent industrial invention, contrasting with the natural, variable relationship humans historically maintained with daylight. Ultimately, the quest to maximize evening light through clock manipulation often results in darker, disorienting mornings, suggesting that modern society must reconcile its technological reliance on precise time with the persistent, evolutionary needs of the human body.