Daylight Saving Time: A Bipartisan Attack on Sleep

Changing the clocks is "acutely bad for our health," yet we do it anyway. Darwin would be proud.

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Every couple I know has a spender and a saver. (There’s also one person who loads the dishwasher like a German engineer and another who does it like a drunk raccoon, but that’s another post entirely.) You probably will not be surprised to learn that I am the spender in my marriage.

If I were a singer, my chart-topping single would go like this: “Let’s paint the house! Let’s remodel the bathroom! Let’s go to Greece! Let’s buy electric bikes! Tra-la-la-la-la wheeeeee!”

The saver I share a bathroom and a last name with, of course, shoots down the vast majority of these purchases investments in our happiness.

“Why does it always default to not spending?” I pout. “Why can’t it be, ‘well, I want to buy it and you don’t, so I guess we’ll just buy it then’?”

Marriage, it turns out, is a lot like government—doing nothing is the default.

Case in point: Daylight Saving Time.