Nearly 40% of the world turned their clocks forward an hour this morning and maybe for the last time. Daylight saving time requires Americans in most states and territories to set their clocks forward one hour on the second Sunday of March, and back one hour on the first Sunday of November, per the National Institute of Standards and Technology. However, this Fall Back / Spring Forward business could soon be a thing of the past.

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time which has a small but strong constituency—but shouldn’t,” President Trump writes on X. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient and very costly to our Nation.” However, only the U.S. Congress can adjust the clocks, Trump notwithstanding. In 2022, the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act by unanimous consent though no iteration ever passed the House.

For now, only Arizona and Hawaii have Permanent Standard Time — the honest, natural clock, set to the sun. Though roughly 30 states have introduced their own legislation to end time changes, few have enacted them. Likewise, the European Parliament proposed removing daylight saving time altogether across the EU, but the initiative presents a confounding challenge for transportation and has yet to be implemented. At the core of the debate about changing clocks lies some science.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) says the U.S. and Europe should adopt Permanent Standard Time pursuant to their public’s overall health and safety. They observe, correctly, that seasonal time changes misalign the universe from man which can result in dangerous health and safety consequences, including: an increase in stroke and hospital admissions, cardiovascular events, and mood disturbances.

Moreover, the AASM reminds us that we've heard this debate before. In 1973, the United States instituted a permanent day light saving routine that objectively failed. Initially popular, the year-round Permanent Standard Time was instituted across the nation in response to the 1973 Oil Crisis. The rationale of which was that longer daylight hours would produce less energy consumption. However, when winter arrived parents grew concerned about their children walking to school in abject darkness which led to a decline in support and repeal of the law within a year.

While the United States and Europe continue to turn their clocks forward, it was Great Britain who initially led the crusade in 1847 when they replaced Greenwich Mean with Railway Time.

In 1883, the U.S. followed suit with a five-zone system to connect its burgeoning American railways. Based on a telegraph signal from the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh at exactly noon on the 90th meridian, the 1918 Standard Time Act established standard time and officially introduced daylight savings. (DST).

However, over the past 100 years, a common theme among researchers of varying backgrounds is that changing clocks causes longterm negative effects. Opponents of the Sunshine Protection Act argue Permanent Standard Time would be more beneficial to health and human welfare. Numerous health specialists, safety experts, and research societies consider permanent standard time better for health, safety, schools, and the economy. Thats because standard time aligns with the circadian cycle.

The circadian clock’s primary function is to rhythmically coordinate biological processes so they occur at the correct time to optimize fitness and performance. Circadian rhythms have evolved independently in animal, plant, and man’s kingdoms of life. "Clocks slay time..." William Faulkner wrote, “only when the clock stops does time come to life."

The AASM agrees. "Syncing our circadian clock to daily routines contributes to safer morning commutes, improved student welfare, religious practices (Orthodox Judaism, Islam), increased exposure to healthy morning sunlight, and higher productivity and wages." The AASM continues:

Conversely, hundreds of scientific studies show that disrupting the circadian clocks leads to increased rates of heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, obesity, depression, substance abuse and suicide.

Fact: Morning sunlight — the body’s most potent time setting cue — tethers human beings to the Earth’s 24-hour day/night cycle. Exposure to sunlight soon after we wake governs inner clocks that control our sleep, attention, mood, body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, hunger, cell division and hundreds of other bodily functions.

When human beings shift to DST their morning light exposure drops, biological clocks fall out of sync, and they pay a price. DST’s lighter, longer evenings are good for commerce but keep us up longer; spending and engaged so we get to bed later and sleep less; making it more difficult to wake and rise with the sun.

The idea of aligning waking hours to daylight hours was first proposed in 1784 by the American polymath Benjamin Franklin. He writes to the editor of the Journal de Paris: “Let a tax be laid on every window with shutters to keep out the light of the sun.” Franklin admitted the article was a warning to Parisians about “technology's imminent effects on human health.”

While industrialized societies rely on clocks to get to work, go to school and coordinate their social lives, agrarian society's daily routines for work and personal conduct were always governed by the light, solar time, and the earth's natural seasons and axial tilt.

In March 2025, President Trump called DST a “50-50 issue.”

If something's a 50-50 issue, it's hard to get excited about it. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier, because they don't want to take their kids to school in the dark … It’s something I can do but a lot of people like it one way, and a lot of people like it the other way.

As lyrical as that sounds, when Franklin created the lightning hypothesis, and calculated the discovery of electricity, he was concerned that the "technology revolution could create modern conveniences that would inevitably lead to apathy in an industrialized society."

Perhaps why over 60% of the world demurred, didn't change their clocks, rise with the sun; and continue to align their circadian rhythms with nature. A tacit agreement between the routines of subsistence and the very purpose of our existence.