Stop whining about daylight savings time.

Happy Daylight Saving Bellyaching Week to all those observing this festival. That’s most of you, I think. This newspaper dutifully prints and reprints as much antiDST content as it can scrape together every year when it comes time to spring forward, and popular agitation against the changing of clocks is continuous wherever the law insists upon it. Where it doesn’t, as in most of Saskatchewan, the people congratulate themselves endlessly on their superior rationality.

Of course the only reason we have time zones at all is that in the 19th century, as steam and rail made the world smaller, synchronization of watches and clocks was thought to be the paramount form of rationality. Refusing to observe daylight saving puts Saskatchewan awkwardly out of choral step over the course of the year with the rest of Canada, and with most of the United States and Europe. The local inconvenience of this is why the area around the border city of Lloydminster has a statutory right to adhere to Alberta time, and why Creighton, a cross-border suburb of Flin Flon, Man., ignores the law and follows Manitoba’s clock.

Everybody likes the system that suits his own circumstances — but the ultimate logical consequence of this would be the old world without time zones, in which every community sets the clocks by local solar noon. In fact, no one who complains about daylight saving pays the slightest attention to solar noon. Some just dislike the clock adjustment in itself, feeling that it impairs them for a few days after the shift. Others have concerns about an alleged mismatch between the hours they keep personally (often as parents or commuters) and the sky or the weather.

Well, if each man had his own clock, no one would need one. But daylight saving obviously is something of a holdover from the obnoxious 20th-century Zeitgeist of thoughtless progressive regimentation and neurotic modernist orderliness. The original justification for daylight saving was to conserve energy, but it was only an informed guess that it would work, and even if the guess was right, it was made in a world without universal central heating, air conditioning or LED lighting.

Local inquiries suggest that in some places, including Alberta, daylight saving might now have a perverse energy-wasting effect. But from an energy-efficiency standpoint, who knows what any local optimum might be? Edmonton might not “belong” in the same time zone as Calgary; since it’s at a different latitude, it probably doesn’t. For all one knows, Edmonton should live and work on Budapest’s clock year-round, or perhaps change clocks 15 times a year rather than two.

In other words, clocks serve a lot of different purposes and we should be careful about screwing around with them according to any one master criterion. If you think that daylight saving is a mess, it is because we already changed the way we use clocks to serve one overriding purpose — energy conservation — that seemed important at the time.

Nowadays increasing attention is being devoted to the idea that the clock change might have negative health consequences. This is a therapeutic civilization, and health is a good candidate for a new master criterion that leads us down a mistaken path. When I look at the health research, I see a lot of reasons to be skeptical. The major studies on daylight saving and heart attacks, for example, seem to have a lot of the statistical problems that are causing universal sphincter-clenching in the contemporary sciences.

Since all the studies are retrospective, there’s a possible “file-drawer” problem: many scientists have good datasets to peek at, but only the ones who spot an effect publish the results. And I regret to say there is a lot of obvious cherry-picking. Study A finds a significant increase in heart attacks on the Tuesday after the clocks spring forward. Study B says no, it’s actually the Monday. Study C is sure that it’s the Sunday, but also finds that heart attacks decline on the Monday after the clocks fall back.

The papers also often say “Ah, we didn’t find a significant overall effect on heart health, but we did find an effect for myocardial infarctions of type D, or among people already on medication E, or on one or the other of the sexes.” Such authors are always ready with a theoretical pretext for whatever subgroup their fishing expedition reeled in. The effects are never enormous and never at a slam-dunk level of statistical significance.

If there’s any boogieman there, it can’t be too large. But let’s face it. None of us is so careful about his sleep habits, or her health, that we should be worrying about the spring-forward killing us. If your life was so well organized that you could afford to be concerned about the microscopic increase of stress from daylight saving, you would probably have your act together well enough to go to bed an hour earlier the night the clock changes.

Certainly if my neighbours in Edmonton cared as much as they say they do about it being light out when they start out for work, they would notice that they’re living at an extremely stupid latitude — but also that, as a consequence of their horrible choice, the daylight will last a full hour longer within two weeks. In short, everyone needs to chill out a little. Maybe it’s all the whining and moaning that is giving us the heart trouble.

IF EACH MAN HAD HIS OWN CLOCK, NO ONE WOULD NEED ONE.