So you want to abolish DST

(with apologies to qntm.org/abolish)

You’ve noticed something.

Twice a year, the clocks change. People complain. Sleep is disrupted. Meetings get missed. For a few days, everything feels slightly off.

This is obviously unacceptable.

You propose a solution:

Abolish Daylight Saving Time.

No more switching. No more confusion. One consistent time, forever.

Clean. Simple. Elegant.

Wrong.

The year is not consistent

Let’s begin with a constraint.

The amount of daylight in a day changes over the year.

Not a little. A lot.

This is not negotiable. This is not a policy failure. This is axial tilt.

You cannot abolish this.

So any timekeeping system must deal with it.

There are only two options:

  1. Keep schedules fixed and let daylight drift
  2. Adjust schedules to follow daylight

DST is option 2.

Abolishing DST is option 1.

Option 1 does not mean “no change”

This is the first mistake.

You think removing DST removes change.

It does not.

It removes synchronized change.

If you fix the clock year-round, people will still respond to daylight:

Except now, they won’t do it together.

Instead of two coordinated adjustments per year, you get thousands of unsynchronized ones.

You have not eliminated the problem.

You have distributed it.

Time is a shared protocol

Time is not about truth. It is about agreement.

When you schedule something at 9:00, you are not aligning with the sun. You are aligning with other people.

DST preserves that alignment.

Everyone moves together. The system stays coherent.

Without it, coordination degrades. Slowly, unevenly, invisibly.

This is worse.

You actually like DST

You may not think you do.

You may say you prefer “natural time,” or “consistency,” or “not messing with clocks.”

But observe behavior, not opinions.

When DST begins, evenings get lighter.

People go outside more. Stay out longer. Do things.

Nothing physical has changed except the label on the clock.

And yet the outcome is different.

This is the point.

The evening is valuable

Morning light is cheap.

It often arrives when people are asleep, commuting, or constrained.

Evening light is expensive.

It occurs when people have autonomy.

DST moves light from where it is underused to where it is valuable.

This is not theoretical. This is observable.

“Just make DST permanent”

Ah, refinement.

You accept DST is good, but object to switching. So:

Keep DST year-round.

Now you have consistency and longer evenings.

Except.

Winter still exists.

Sunrise drifts later. And later. And later.

Eventually, you are waking, commuting, and starting your day in darkness—not briefly, but for months.

You have solved summer.

You have broken winter.

“Then shift the time zone”

Another iteration:

If DST is better, just move the whole region one hour forward.

Now you have reinvented DST.

Except permanently.

Which means it is correct for part of the year, and incorrect for the rest.

Because, again:

The Earth is tilted.

No fixed offset solves a moving problem.

What DST actually is

DST is not an arbitrary annoyance.

It is a crude, global, twice-yearly synchronization event.

It says:

The relationship between human schedules and daylight has drifted. Adjust.

Everyone adjusts together. The system remains intact.

It is not perfect.

It is coherent.

What abolishing DST actually does

It does not remove adjustment.

It privatizes it.

Each organization, each industry, each individual begins solving the same problem independently.

Badly.

Inconsistently.

Without coordination.

The choice

You are not choosing between:

You are choosing between:

Keep DST

Because the year changes.

Because people coordinate.

Because two predictable adjustments are better than continuous, unbounded drift.

Because the alternative is not simplicity.

It is entropy.