A friend and I were discussing about the term 'daylight saving' since he practises it when he studies abroad while enjoying ice cream. And I am thoroughly perplexed, like receiving a bad mental cramp that warps your brain.
According to Wiki, "Daylight saving time (DST) – is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn"
This is so because certain periods of the year experience a longer amount of sunlight and vice versa, and so people have thought of a way to make use of the more than usual abundance of sun rays to benefit economical activities that associate with sunlight.
Alls good and well and pretty much comprehensible except when I think deeper about it.
You cannot "save" time like how you save up money. Time is not a tangible good, although it can be represented/measured by units. Time is used to sequence events, to quantify the duration of events and or the intervals between them. Simply put, it is to measure and quantify motions of objects and other changes. Its almost impossible to think about the world without the meaning of time.
As such, how can one possibly "save" time? All DST has done is to make everybody in a country adjust the timing of their watches faster/slower at the exact calculated moment generated and governed by time lines around the world and the natural world.
So, the way I see it, you would be living one hour in the future in Spring, and one hour in the past in Autumn according to DST standards.
"Doesnt that even things out nicely? You took some from the front, so you give back the same at the back." You would say.
And then as I contemplated more, the more it did not register, because for eg; the time on my watch would read 5pm in Autumn according to the DST, but I am actually living "in" ( I use "in" because I could not think of a better proposition) 4pm.
But whether or not you adjust your watch by 1 hour or 10 hours, time passes by just the same. It does not "slow down/speed up" just because the entire nation has adjusted their timing. So all those hours "sped" up during Spring, eg; 90hours, has not really been sped up at all, you would have been "shortchanged" 90 hours of your life! And because time cannot be "saved" arbitrary, during Autumn, you would have been "cheated" of another 90 hours. So how old are you by the end of 20 years?
I am not sure if anyone even understands what I am trying to say at all. Or maybe that I am taking DST wayyyyyy too seriously.
But because of this, I had an idea. Different time zones exist around the world because of invisible time lines drawn up coupled together with the curvature of the earth's surface and rotation.
What if I found a way to travel around the world, making use of all these different time zones and DST such that I arrive back home the exact date I left it? I would have cheated, swindled, tricked, deceived the laws of physics and gained one day!
But then again, when I looked upon the melty goo in my cup, I decided that was that and thank god Singapore is free from DST rules, and hurriedly finished my ice cream, or what had remained anyway.