The daylight is regained in the evening, of course, but I’ll grant that waking up before the sun is miserable. If you wake up at 6:30 like a normal human (note: “normal” still sucks), DST makes you wake up in darkness for a handful of extra days in spring and fall. In New York, you’d have to wake up at 4:30 AM or go to bed absurdly early in order for DST not to increase daylight in your waking hours. There is a cool interactive piece about this by Keith Collins on Quartz charting how keeping or abolishing DST would affect your daylight hours.

For the record I’m no DST hater, because my morning commute is about 5 seconds (no pants required) so I never need to wake up before the sun, and I live in a place where the sun sets at 4:11 in the damn afternoon in winter so I’d love to push that back an hour. People often don’t even know what they’re complaining about: they’ll rail against “daylight saving time” even if it’s the early sunsets of standard time that they hate. Usually the whining is short-term shock at the sudden change in the timing of day and night, not a reasoned assessment of what it means for the timing of daylight over the whole year. Maybe you’re even one of the people saying it. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter or really are any person in America with friends who say things, you hear it twice a year, in March and November: “LIFE IS THE WORST WHY DO WE HAVE TO CHANGE THE CLOCKS WE SHOULD GET RID OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!!!!!”. Tl dr version: just scroll down and play with the map.

Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time-whether they’re for or against it-with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it

Frodo and bilbo baggins