Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I grew up in rural Canada, and we had busses. Some kids came in from 60+ miles away. I recall quite a bit about school, and yet no one really complained about getting up at 5 to 6am.

Of course, most kids lived on farms, some even had chores before going to school, and early to bed, early to rise was normal.

We had a few antenna TV stations, no cable, VCRs weren't around for the average family, and of course no Internet.

We also didn't have city street lights / ambient light, street noise, the sound of neighbours.

People have gotten up early to do farm work for aeons, and go to sleep early too. In fact, to be more precise, staying up past 8 or 9pm is an urban / modern aberration.

Point is, staying up late is the problem. Nothing more.

Now of course, society has changed, so maybe change is needed. However, there is also a lot of counter literature on even TV as a sleep depriver. And now we have phone in bed, with a glowing screen, keeping a mind active.

My point? OK, change the time. However, will kids just stay up even later?

Or, as they do now, will they think "I should go to sleep now, or I will be tired tomorrow, but just one more text..."?

Staying up late is much easier then getting up early. Anyone who gets up early and then has to be anywhere can speak to the general paralysis that involves, since the entire activity has to be planned around a very sharp time-based shutdown.

Stealing hours later is a lot easier, because any amount of sleep will still break up the day compared to none.

The other reason of course is that the real trick is just staying up longer then your parents: that's the only truly unsupervised freedom you have as a kid.

No major disagreement, but I will add this...

Eating too much, borrowing more money than you should, eating junk food, staying up too late, being addicted to your phone, texting whilst driving, perhaps these are all the same problem?

And like any animal, we need to be trained to control ourselves, when young, for our own good?

Most developed countries are far enough from the equator that the amount of daylight is very different during different parts of the year. Perhaps it would make sense to base the schedule around sunrise and sunset rather than around arbitrary numbers?

How exactly are we supposed to run a modern society without the concept of time?

You can have a time system based around sunrise.

I mean with most clocks also being internet connected computers it wouldnt be too hard to make a system where you measure time in hours after average sunrise in a tike zone.

That is where I live right now it's sunrise +3.

I'll reschedule the daily 'standup' to SR+3.5, the banks open at SR+3 and close at SR+11.

One major consequence I can see is that now we have north south timezones on top of east west.

This would break in the extreme north or south where there are days without a sunrise.

That's what time zones are. You're just proposing more granular time zones. And none of them can fix the problem that in a lot of places the days are just short in the winter.

Timezones don't account for seasonal changes in sunrise times, and DST is a poor hack that tries and fails. Using local solar time would be an improvement in that regard. On short days you just do less.

Timezones are a reasonable compromise between the desire for people to be up during the day, on one hand, and the need for a modern economy to be able to coordinate people over long distances, on the other. Turning up the dial all the way to the left here is going to cause a lot of problems.

As far as human biology is concerned, the entire concept of agriculture is a modern perversion. You can't use it to argue a particular behavior is the natural state.

And yet people get up before dawn to go fishing and hunting.

At no point did I cite biology. Instead, I validated that different wake-up times have existed in the past, and in fact still do.

When does the garbage man, the builder, the mechanic get up? The blue collar man? It isn't 8am, that's for sure. People I know in these professions of start work at 7am. Or earlier. I see them get to sleep by 9pm.

Get to sleep sooner, discipline yourself, as with anything else, it's just that easy.

Or that hard?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com