A Matter of Time

Each Spring, an hour is stolen. The last few years, we've been threatened with not getting it back. How'd we get here, and where are we going? When we arrive, will we know what time it really is?

Atlanta, GA

March 8, 2026

We didn’t used to need governments to tell us the time. For millennia the sun did it for us, enabling our ancestors to get thru the day.

Medieval clocks added some precision. But their main “improvement” (if we want to call it that) on the ancient sundial was they enabled us to tell time at night.

Not that many people cared. In those days, most of them were wise (and tired) enough to use darkness as a signal to sleep.

It wasn’t till the 19th century, when time-pieces proliferated, that businesses, households, and personal pockets began acquiring clocks… and becoming slaves to them.

Around the world, each town kept its own time, based off the moment the sun was directly overhead. Brooklyn ran ahead of Manhattan. It was slightly earlier in Ostia than in Rome. Oakland ate breakfast a few minutes before San Francisco ordered coffee.

Zones of Time

It wasn’t till human locomotion outpaced Apollo’s chariot that the patchwork of times became a problem. That happened when the trains arrived.

But it was tough to keep them running on time. For anyone to know when that meant, the railroads needed a schedule.

To enable coordination among local patchworks of minutes, competing lines agreed on zones of time… based loosely on the position of the sun. Most government officials were beholden to the industry, and went along.

But train time was a lie, which was patently obvious to any idiot under the sun. Despite being told it was noon, the average person knew his shadow was too long. Something wasn’t right. Yet there was no hole to which he could retreat.

“Progress” had arrived. Rather than establish a “universal time” (like GMT) from which to set schedules while leaving local time to catch natural rays, government-backed railroad monopolies inflicted the top-down time zones we endure today.

These were agreed upon in 1889, and given force of federal law in 1918. As a result, the time we tell by ignoring nature remains… like flickering shadows on Plato’s cave… a pale reflection of unrelenting reality, further distorted by biannual changing of erroneous clocks.

“Sunshine Protection”

Last night, as happens each year, our hour was taken. As is their wont, a lot of legislators don’t want to give it back.

Even when government tries to do the right thing, it does it the wrong way. A few years ago, the Senate voted to repeal the biannual ritual of adjusting clocks. But it did so by keeping the wrong time.

Standard Time – denoted as such because it more closely follows our natural rhythms and the solar cycle – would’ve disappeared. Or, more accurately… as with the local hours from an earlier age… it’d still be there. We’d simply have ignored it, and suffered the consequences.

Fortunately, a few years ago the “Sunshine Protection Act” withered in Congress, proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. But, like a Spring allergy, it keeps coming back.

The notion that an act of Congress can “protect sunshine” is as ludicrous as the concept that passing laws can control the weather, that pulling inches from a foot can make us taller, or that putting more ounces in a pound can reduce our weight.

The “Sunshine Protection Act” is like most legislation. The only thing dumber than the name is the stupidity of the idea. The biannual time change needs to go. But the solar clock needs to stay.

Our sense of reality is already too warped, and time is among the least of the distortions. But it’s a potent symptom of endemic delusion.

At this moment, where I write, the official time is almost two hours ahead of where the sun actually sits. Atlanta lies at the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, so our local clock always outpaces the stubborn sun.

But “Daylight Savings” compounds the problem. This morning, as if to assert it isn’t wrong enough, our government placed an additional hour between ourselves and the sun.

(If you want to know how wrong time is where you are, you can check this link).

Indulging Fantasies

This isn’t the first effort to enforce this farce. Congress imposed perennial “Daylight Savings” in 1974, but abandoned the two-year experiment even before it was set to expire. As children stood at dark bus stops and circadian rhythms became confused, people realized they hated the unnatural attempt to monkey with time.

If this latest effort passes, Arizona and Hawaii will be the only states where the clocks are (somewhat) correct. All others will permanently pretend to be part of the time zone immediately to their east (some, like the New England states, probably should be).

But this isn’t surprising. We live in a world that’s filled with phoniness to indulge our fantasies. Don’t like how light it is at 6p? Just pretend it’s 7p! If nothing else, Happy Hour will start that much sooner.

Solar Schoolmarm

Yet each day, like every coin, has two sides. We think we’d enjoy the sun setting after dinner. But will we like it rising a couple hours before lunch? Will we want to begin each day in the middle of nature’s night? Is it healthy to do so? Do we even care?

And do we really want the sun, like a humorless hall monitor, watching over us so deep into the day? A setting sun is a signal. Time to retreat home from a hectic day…perhaps to open a window in the summer, or light a fire in the winter. We lift our feet, pour some wine, and loosen our limbs. We relax, and let our hair down.

These natural inclinations are less instinctive with a solar schoolmarm standing over us. She has her place. But it’s in the morning, to roust us awake and get us going. We don’t need an intrusive day hanging around at night, when we gather at the table or round the hearth, to talk about it behind its back.

From ancient sundials to atomic clocks, devices to track time are intended to tell the truth. But as night follows day, many of us prefer the lie.

Envisioning an extra hour of evening light, they cheer the deception. It’s easier to see the light than to envision the dark. But no matter how much they finagle their clocks, they’ll get both… and more of each than they think they’d prefer.

In a couple weeks, on the Vernal Equinox, they’ll come in equal measure. Around the world, the solar scale will stand in balance. But the more we try to tip it toward us, the greater the chance we fall off.

JD

PS - For those interested as much in place as in time, perspectives on many of them can be found in my new book that’s now available by clicking the image below: