Daylight Savings as Maladaptive Faustianism

2,363 words

My grandmother used to walk me to school when I was in kindergarten. This was before mass shootings across the country provoked enhanced school security measures, and us kids would simply line up in front of the building before being let inside. One kid in particularly was always first. He was a blond boy whom we’ll call Johnny. He always took such pride in being first, scurrying into the classroom before everyone else.

Johnny’s parents arrived late one morning, and he had to be second in line. He threw a fit, and I couldn’t help but feel a little schadenfreude. My position in line didn’t matter to me, because I knew that once I got into the building I’d end up doing the same finger painting, recite the same times tables, read the same texts about seeing Spot run, and have the same debates about whose dad was stronger as all the other kids. So why did Johnny feel so strongly about being first? The larger question is why people compete with each other over doing things earlier in the day when they could be done more easily and just as well at a later time.

Conscientious people wake up earlier, and conscientiousness correlates with success, especially in men. We often hear stories of star athletes and self-made billionaires who wake up long before dawn. Some even attribute this practice to their success. Conscientiousness is also associated with hard work, long hours, orderliness, long-term planning, and self-discipline. Conscientiousness benefits an individual tremendously, but helps society only up to a point. Sticking to a plan precludes developing and adapting to better plans, after all.

Inspiration can come from unusual sources. For example, Descartes claims that an angel visited him in a dream and inspired him to develop his theories of analytical geometry. Descartes benefited humanity by developing this particular area of mathematics — but it didn’t come from sticking to a plan or hard work. It came from out of the blue.

Conscientiousness negatively correlates with creativity. Creativity can benefit everyone in the long run, but when conscientious people impose their early-morning habits on others, they make everyone miserable — and potentially inhibit creativity.

Proponents of daylight savings claim that it helps people to save money on energy by allowing them to get more done during the daylight hours. The first to practice it were the Germans during the First World War, when it was enacted with the aim of saving electricity. While such drastic measures may be needed in war, they’re not necessary in peacetime.

Daylight savings does more harm than good to people’s quality of life. Getting up an hour earlier disrupts the body’s circadian rhythms, or biological clock. This is something foundational to our identity not only as white people, but as humans, since nearly all life on Earth has a biological clock. In humans, disrupting the circadian rhythm causes inflammation and a cascade of other effects which may lead to clogging of the arteries and heart attacks. Studies have shown that Swedes and others living in the most northerly latitudes are most at risk for cardiac problems because they experience a much greater variation in daylight hours over the course of the year than other peoples. For example, in Stockholm there’s 16 hours of darkness in mid-winter, and only three hours of darkness in md-summer. This is already quite extreme even without daylight savings subjecting people to even greater degrees of change.

Daylight savings is harmful in other ways as well. A paper from 2004 concluded that the switch to daylight savings kills 171 pedestrians and 195 motorists per year in the United States by causing motorists to become drowsy.

Let’s look at this in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. Daylight savings allegedly saves 1.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the US each year. Given that kilowatt hours cost an average of 15 cents each, this amounts to $195 million saved per year. As we’ve seen, daylight savings has been shown to kill 366 people every year — and this does not count those who may be dying because of the associated cardiac problems. The value of a human life in terms of economic output is about $10 million, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The daylight savings death toll therefore results in $10 million times 366 being lost, or $3.66 billion — well over the $195 million it supposedly saves in electricity costs.

Polls show that more and more Americans are beginning to oppose daylight savings. According to Almanac.com:

In a poll of Americans in 2015:

23% wanted year-round standard time;
23% wanted year-round Daylight Savings Time (DST); and
48% wanted to switch between standard time and DST.

However, the results of the same poll in 2021 showed that:

40% of Americans want year-round standard time;
31% of Americans wanted year-round DST time; and
28% of Americans want to switch between standard time and DST.

Some may argue that daylight savings is an example of the Faustian urge to overcome nature at great costs. But not all Faustian urges are noble. It’s one thing to overcome the limits of gravity by flying planes in the sky, but it’s another to fighting one’s own circadian rhythm. Daylight savings is therefore an example of maladaptive Faustianism.

Studies also show that early birds like Johnny may not be doing so well after all. Night owls, who presumably wake up later, are more intelligent on average and make more money. One must wonder, then, that if whites are the most intellectual race, as the ratings of the Greatest Minds ever on Ranker.com attest, then why do whites diligently stick to daylight savings while Mongoloids and Africans do not observe it at all in their countries?

Graph A shows that Northern Europeans, Australians, and Americans tend to go to bed earlier than Southern Europeans. Graph B shows that the earlier people go to bed, the more sleep they tend to get — the potential difference being a half-hour. Source: A global quantification of “normal” sleep schedules using smartphone data

What’s more, why do Northwestern Europeans, who are the most likely to win Nobel prizes, wake up earlier than Southern Europeans? Maybe when people are more tired, it forces them to evolve a greater genetic potential for intelligence and creativity to deal with it. But this would seem to fall more heavily on intelligent people (all other things being equal), and is thus potentially dysgenic.

High latitude alone cannot explain why Northwestern Europeans wake up before Southern Europeans because most of the US is at the same latitude as Southern Europe, yet white Americans tend to wake up the earliest of all. Most white Americans have ancestors from Northwestern Europe, so maybe their circadian genes cause them go to bed and get up earlier regardless of where they live. In higher latitudes, the Sun rises earlier, and this is a prime opportunity for agriculture and fishing. It may have been particularly important for them to take advantage of daylight when they had it, since Europe is cloudier than the rest of Eurasia, and warm. Individuals having morning-person genes would thus outbreed those with night-owl genes. This is probably indeed happening, as Neanderthal DNA is a good barometer of how genes are being selected against in the white population, since nature has been selecting against it for tens of thousands of years, ever since the ancestors of whites interbred with Neanderthals. Unsurprisingly, researchers suspect it correlates with being a night owl.

Evolutionary history can be useful, but we don’t live in a subsistence agrarian economy anymore, and we don’t all live in Northern Europe. Dr. Paul Kelley, a research associate in sleep science, states that 10 AM is the best time to start work rather than 8 AM, the average time that jobs begin in America. According to Kelley, starting work at 10 AM

would have an immediate positive impact on current levels of adult sleep deprivation caused by early workday start times. It would reduce sleep deprivation by 70%, to 36 minutes on average a day.

Echoing this sentiment, a study published in the journal Sleep “found that with every hour work started later in the morning, people got 20 more minutes of sleep.”

The natural time of one’s sleep duration is called a chronotype. Young men’s chronotype makes them want to stay up and wake up later than older people and young women, but this changes in middle age, as men in their 50s wake up earlier than women of the same age.

There are benefits to allowing young people to sleep in later. A study on middle-school students showed that switching school start times from 8:50 AM to 10 AM resulted in a substantial improvement in academic performance, reduced the number of absences due to illness by half, and of course improved sleep duration. One would think this would induce school officials to push back their daily start times, but, as Aaron Clarey has noted, public schools don’t exist primarily to benefit the students but rather the teachers and school officials. School principals tend to be men in their 50s, when men get up one hour earlier on average than when they’re young adults. Getting up early is physically easier for them, and they don’t mind tormenting the kids by making them do it, too. Nevertheless, this research has had some impact. Many schools in California used to begin as early as 7:15 AM, but the state government passed a law restricting middle schools from starting before 8 AM and high schools from starting before 8:30 AM.

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Starting the day abnormally early is the result of a kind of failed prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a scenario in game theory where two prisoners are told that if one of them cooperates with police, the one who cooperates will go free while the other will receive a longer sentence. In practice this usually means that both prisoners end up snitching on each other. If we apply this scenario to business starting times, if one company allows its workers to begin at 10 AM, a competing business can start earlier and get the job done sooner. Since there are no regulations in place to limit when businesses can begin their work days, they can’t take the risk of attempting to change hours.

The US government once enforced blue laws that forced employers to close on Sundays. This was because most Americans were practicing Christians and went to church on Sundays. Nowadays, however, these laws are rarely if ever enforced, and more and more people are being forced to work not only on Sundays, but also on formerly sacrosanct holidays like Thanksgiving. If the government or a union steps in to protect workers’ holidays, everyone benefits — but when they don’t, everyone suffers. Laws could be passed to force companies to start later in the day. The least they could do is to stop making things worse by ending daylight savings.

There are several reasonable counter-arguments for starting work earlier, however. One is that some workers may want to get out of work sooner so that they can spend time with their families. But there are other ways of doing this. One would be to switch from an eight-hour work day to a seven-hour one. Another would be to allow more people to work remotely, which eliminates time-consuming commutes and likewise allows workers to spend more time with family.

Another argument suggests that, referring to Graph B in above chart, the earlier a nation goes to bed, the more sleep its people get on average. However, if switching to earlier start times guarantees more sleep, we would expect students in the school studies to have gotten less sleep when they shifted to a 10 AM start time. In fact, the exact opposite happened, and adults who start later get more sleep, too.

Many genes determine one’s circadian rhythm, and since early birds like to get up early by nature, they may claim they have the right to start work earlier. Be that as it may, they don’t have the right to force others who don’t share their genetic proclivities to wake up early any more than a night owl has a right to force them to start later.

Probably the least bad argument for sticking to early-morning start times is that psychopaths — and more generally, individuals who rank highly on the Dark Triad traits of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism — tend to stay up late. Since these people tend to lack empathy for others, accommodating them is rather useless because they won’t return the favor. Although some studies indicate that psychopaths in particular need less sleep, so they don’t suffer as much as those who naturally stay up late — typically intelligent and young people, especially young men.

Going to bed early, as in around 10-11 PM, seems to be best for people health-wise, and night owls should try to go to bed earlier. However, forcing everyone to start work or school early is a sort of collective self-flagellation that probably only harms white people. It’s best if we all go to bed as early as we can and allow people to start work at a humane time of 10 AM or even later, whenever possible.

Whites seem to be disposed to what I call Faustianism, or the need to overcome nature’s limits. This manifests itself in both adaptive and maladaptive ways. Adaptive Faustianism is grounded in promoting behaviors that enable whites to pass on their genes to future generations, enabling their populations to grow in number and improve in moral, intellectual, and physical quality. They shouldn’t be maladaptively Faustian about things such as adhering to daylight savings time and starting work early. Johnny, my kindergarten peer who yearned to be first in line, should learn from those Southern Europeans who get up an hour later on average.

As we wait for the white world to turn away from the daylight-savings madness, there are things we can do in the meantime. Employers can offer flexible schedules where employees can start earlier or later if they wish. For example, if an office’s start time is 8 AM, then let the stalwart boomer start at 7 if he so chooses, but let the young guy just out of school start at 11. Employers may find that the increased productivity from better-rested young male employees outweighs whatever inconveniences are caused by letting them start later.

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