Leave Time Alone

Spring forward! This is my gentle reminder that daylight savings time starts the second Sunday of March. It's hard to believe that this whole thing was a bit of a joke started by Benjamin Franklin out of his love of economy. However, the U.S. Department of Transportation takes it seriously. Their studies show that DST is economical. In fact, it trims the United State's power usage by about 1 percent per day. However, after DST was extended in 2007, gasoline use increased as Americans went out to enjoy their extra hours of sun.

Of course we don't want to waste those extra hours of sun! We take the whole "time is money" metaphor very seriously. In Time Out of Mind, Stefan Klein discusses the misguided notion that time is money:

But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.

I think we should leave time alone. The architects of Stonehenge understood time, and they didn't mess with shifting all those big stones twice a year!