Nothing matters
Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
Yesterday was “spring foward,” which is one of my favorite days of the year. My girlfriend hates it. She feels she loses an hour of sleep. In fact, she generally despises daylight saving time.
And if you were to believe the complaints you see on the internet, she's in the majority, which is fine by me. I begin to question my mental acuity when I agree with the masses.
For me, I just love getting off from work and having it be broad daylight, and I look forward to the spring mornings when I can sit on the deck and watch the dawn. In fact, I count down the daily minutes as we approach daylight saving time. Some may not be aware of this, but as the planet wobbles south in the spring, we pick up a couple of minutes of sunlight at a regular rate every day.
But can I at least dispute the concept that seems so prevalent on the internet, that we somehow “lose” an hour of time when we switch to daylight saving?
Time is not what passes on the clock. Clocks are a more or less accurate measurement of the passage of time, but they are not time. Time is a dimension, and it exists whether we measure it or not. I suppose the whole concept of subjective time has a place in this, but in the scope of a human life, subjectivity changes with the moment of perception, therefore that ticking clock is the only one that matters—and even then, it only matters in the long haul.
Look at it this way. You're going to get a certain number of hours in your life. What it says on the clockface is irrelevant to the amount of time you have. You could wear a broken watch for your whole life, and your life would be neither longer nor shorter because of it, although it might be a little bit kookier and richer if you wear a broken watch for 70 years or so. (And I'd just like to point out, if it's digital, it won't be right twice a day.)
But I'm a bit OCD, and I enjoy spending that part of the morning twice a year making sure all four clocks in the kitchen show the exact same moment in time.
