
I'm a simple emigrant, and in Germany today they changed the time
Every year in Germany they switch the time to daylight saving time in March and back to standard time in October. And I somehow never wondered why they even do this. It turns out they do this quite seriously: they adjust the clock hands to follow the sun in order to save electricity. The logic is simple: we adapt our lives to the daylight — less light is needed — everyone is happy. And for over a hundred years Europe has been fiddling with this time change. First they introduced it, then canceled it, then reintroduced it and canceled it again, allegedly because the change reminded too much of wartime. Then they introduced it again and now they’re trying to cancel it, and in 2021 they even decided to cancel. But due to COVID the changes were postponed; I don’t know what COVID has to do with it. Mostly, they want to cancel it because in the modern world we no longer burn coal, and besides, the “saved” evening light in summer is spent in the morning, and anyway lighting is no longer the main item of electricity consumption. At the same time they say that the time change affects our health; I don’t know if that’s true. In any case, I would prefer to always live on daylight saving time and not complicate my life.