The Life of Lou Ruppert

The spring clock switch always reveals to me the foolishness of mankind. We agree together for half a year to pretend it’s a different time than it really is, and then we switch back. The result is that twice a year, every man, woman, and child in America is cranky and jet lagged. People have done studies recently and have shown that it actually costs more energy to switch than it does for us to stay in one time. So why do we do it? Inertia.

The thing is, even a drastic change like this, twice a year even, doesn’t cause people to question their underlying assumptions about life. Nobody asks, “Why are we doing this?” We just accept our fate and funnel out of the pasture and onto the train to the new timezone. What other circumstances have we blindly come to accept? What other old things, even things more basic than what time it is, have we come to take for granted before they got taken away from us?

And so ends the first of two semiannual days of confusion. They’re the equinoxes of the industrial age. And to show how truly advanced our civilization is, we now pass from one season to another so quickly that we get jet lag! And this is progress?

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