The alarm rings at 7:15 AM.
You open your eyes, but the world hasn’t opened its eyes yet. Pitch black. You fumble for your phone, the harsh blue light cutting through a bedroom that feels like the middle of the night. Outside your window in Sacramento or Los Angeles, the streetlights are still buzzing. The air is crisp, heavy with the stillness of 3:00 AM, but the clock insists it is time to pack lunches, find keys, and walk the dog.
You step outside. The sidewalk is a shadow. Your children stand at the bus stop, their reflective backpacks glowing in the headlights of passing commuters who are driving half-blind, fueled by extra-large coffees and sheer willpower.
This is not a winter anomaly. If California ever succeeds in its long-brewed quest to lock the clock and make Daylight Saving Time permanent, this will be the reality for months on end.
We are a culture obsessed with the evening. We want the long patio dinners, the twilight golf games, and the golden hour that stretches languidly into the night. When voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 7 in 2018, giving the state legislature the green light to pursue year-round Daylight Saving Time, it felt like a victory for happiness itself. Who wouldn't vote for more sunshine?
But sunshine is a zero-sum game.
To buy an extra hour of light at 8:00 PM, we have to borrow it from the morning. And the interest rate on that loan is devastatingly high.
The Cold Math of a Warm Evening
Consider a typical winter morning under the permanent Daylight Saving Time model.
Right now, when we "fall back" to Standard Time in November, the sun rises in Los Angeles around 6:50 AM at its latest point in the winter. It’s manageable. The sun is up before the school bell rings.
But if we freeze the clock in the summer position, that sunrise jumps forward.
Suddenly, the mid-winter sun in Los Angeles wouldn't peek over the horizon until 7:55 AM. In San Francisco, the darkness lingers even longer, pushing sunrise to a staggering 8:25 AM. Go further north to Eureka, and residents wouldn’t see the first ray of direct sunlight until nearly 8:50 AM.
Imagine working a standard nine-to-five job and spending your entire morning commute, your first cup of office coffee, and your first staff meeting in the dead of winter night.
Our bodies are finely tuned instruments, regulated by an ancient internal biological clock called the circadian rhythm. This system doesn't care about state legislation or the economic benefits of late-night shopping. It cares about photons. When blue light from the morning sun hits our retinas, it stops the production of melatonin—the hormone that makes us sleepy—and triggers the release of cortisol, the hormone that wakes us up.
When we force ourselves into the gears of a society that starts before the sun, we create a phenomenon scientists call social jetlag.
We are living out of sync with the earth. The result isn't just a collective grogginess that can be cured by a shot of espresso. It is a fundamental disruption of human biology.
The Ghost of 1974
This isn’t a hypothetical experiment. We have tried this before.
In January 1974, amid a crippling national energy crisis, the United States plunged into a trial run of year-round Daylight Saving Time. The logic was simple: more evening light would cut down on electricity usage. The public was initially thrilled, with approval ratings soaring above 70 percent when the bill was signed.
The romance lasted exactly one month.
By February, the reality of dark mornings set in. The breaking point came when stories began hitting the nightly news of children being struck by cars while walking to school in the pitch black. In Florida, eight children died in traffic accidents during the first few weeks of the experiment. Governors across the country grew alarmed, and public support plummeted from 79 percent to a dismal 42 percent.
Congress realized they had made a grave miscalculation. They scrambled to repeal the law, cutting the two-year experiment short and returning the nation to the familiar rhythm of the seasonal switch in October of that same year.
We forgot the lessons of 1974 because history has a way of fading when bathed in the warm glow of a July sunset. We look at the summer evening and think, why can’t it always be like this? We forget that winter is coming, and with it, a bill that must be paid in darkness.
The Vulnerable Hours
The human cost of late sunrises is distributed unevenly, hitting the most vulnerable among us the hardest.
Think of outdoor laborers—the construction crews, the agricultural workers in the Central Valley, the utility teams. Under Standard Time, they wait for dawn to begin the most dangerous parts of their jobs. Push sunrise to 8:30 AM, and these workers are faced with a terrible choice: work in the freezing, high-risk darkness to keep projects on schedule, or push their shifts later into the day, cutting into their family time and delaying the economic engine of the state.
Then there are the teenagers.
Pediatricians have warned for decades that adolescent biology naturally shifts toward later sleep and wake times. High schools across California recently fought hard battles to push start times later—to 8:30 AM—specifically to align with teen sleep patterns and ensure students weren't walking to school in the dark.
Moving the sunrise an hour later instantly erases the health benefits of those hard-won late-start laws. Once again, millions of teenagers would be walking, biking, or driving to school before their brains have officially received the biological signal to wake up.
Sleep deprivation is linked to increased rates of depression, anxiety, and performance deficits in school. When we starve the morning of light, we starve our children of the vital neurological reset they need to learn and thrive.
The Illusion of Energy Savings
The ultimate irony of the permanent Daylight Saving Time argument is that the original economic justification no longer holds up.
Modern data shows that the energy savings of keeping the lights off in the evening are almost entirely offset by the energy consumed to heat and light homes during the freezing, dark winter mornings. We aren't saving power; we are just shifting the demand from the television at night to the thermostat in the morning.
Public health organizations, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, have looked at the data and reached a clear consensus. If we are going to eliminate the biannual clock change—a goal almost everyone agrees on to avoid the spike in heart attacks and car accidents that happens every spring—we should choose permanent Standard Time, not permanent Daylight Saving Time.
Standard Time aligns our social clocks with the sun. It protects the morning. It honors the way humans evolved over millennia to interact with the day.
Yet, the allure of the endless summer evening remains a powerful political drug. It is easy to sell a campaign based on barbecues, outdoor shopping, and extra daylight at the end of a grueling workday. It is much harder to campaign on the quiet, unglamorous necessity of a 7:00 AM sunrise.
We are a society that constantly tries to outsmart nature. We build cities in deserts, we turn night into day with artificial light, and we attempt to bend time itself to fit our economic desires.
But the sun cannot be lobbied. It rises when it rises. If we choose to play tricks with the hands of the clock, we must be prepared to look our children in the eye as we send them out into the dark, cold morning, wondering if that extra hour of evening patio time was truly worth the price.
