Having lived in a country that observes DST, or Daylight Saving Time, my whole life, it's understandable that I was confused when I moved somewhere that doesn't. For almost twenty years, I would be physically and mentally confused twice a year when my phone automatically changed and my alarm felt an hour early or late. Now that I live in Japan, where we don't participate in DST, I've realized how strange and unnatural the practice actually is. Out of curiosity, I looked into why we have DST, and why we haven't gotten rid of it yet.

When I was a kid, I was told that DST was made for two reasons: to help farmers have more time to work, and to help people in the "olden days" have more daylight to do their own work. So, to my understanding, DST was created so people could work more. Turns out, that's not necessarily the case, according to timeanddate.com, a website dedicated to--you guessed it--information about time and dates. The idea of DST was initially proposed by Benjamin Franklin to help people conserve candles, though is seems that that might have been a joke more than anything else. The first use of DST was in Canada in 1908, but it didn't come to the US until World War II, when it was called "War Time." Following Franklin's proposal, War Time was created with the intention of conserving resources that were needed for WWII. However, DST didn't end when the war did. Instead, the name was just changed from War Time to Peace Time. Modern DST is still in place to try to conserve energy.

Personally, I think DST is a silly and outdated practice. I respect that it is still around with the intention of saving energy, but with energy-efficient light bulbs, people running their heat and AC regardless of the time of day, and the efforts to switch to more renewable energy sources, is it really necessary? Only about 70 countries in the world actually participate in DST, and because the switch isn't world-wide, it causes issues twice a year when communication has to change based on the time change. On a smaller scale, it means that twice a year, people around the world who want to call their home country have to alter their own sleeping and waking schedules to accommodate this silly practice.

So here's my call, friends: End Daylight Saving Time. Do it for the people around the world who are forced to alter their daily schedule twice a year because their country decides to "spring forward, fall back." Do it for their loved ones in other time zones where DST doesn't happen. Do it so that maybe, with the extra kick in the butt, we can learn to conserve energy in a more effective way than we do now. Hoping people will turn off their lights and other energy-consuming products just because they have an extra hour of daylight isn't going to work anymore.