Daylight Savings Time?

 

This weekend we participate in the twice-yearly tradition of pretending we can negotiate with the sun by messing with our clocks. Twice a year, we lose an hour of sleep or gain one, and somehow this is considered normal.

We don't create more daylight. We just move the numbers around and expect our bodies to sign the paperwork. The sun still rises when it rises. It has been doing this for millions of years without consulting a committee, but we've adopted: Spring Forward, Fall Back.

Spring Forward, Fall Back. Cute little mnemonic. Very catchy. The kind of thing someone puts on a mug and sells for $19.99. It doesn't make the experience any better. It just gives our collective inconvenience a slogan, which is how modern life works: First, someone creates a problem, then someone else invents a phrase to help us remember the problem, and then a third person sells us merchandise.

And the clocks … my phone updates itself, my computer updates itself, but my car, which has more computing power than the spacecraft that took us to the moon, still requires me to press three buttons in a specific order to convince it that time has moved forward.

It's hard to believe that we go along with it … we complain for a day or two, adjust our schedules, and carry on. We do this with everything now. Apps change their layouts, software moves the buttons, and we're all expected to adapt without asking why. Somewhere along the line we stopped asking whether things made sense and started asking how quickly we could adapt to them.

Maybe that's the real irritation. We've become so accustomed to adjusting ourselves to systems that we rarely stop to wonder whether the systems make any sense.

But the sun doesn't care about our calendars. Your dog still wants to eat at its regular time and your body isn't interested in a government-approved time adjustment. So maybe it’s time to admit that moving the hands of a clock twice a year is a peculiar solution to a problem that may not even need solving.

I want my toggle button back

Sometimes I miss broadcast TV. Not in a nostalgic, rabbit-ears kind of way, just in the very specific, muscle-memory way that shows up every football season when I’m holding a remote and trying to do something that used to require exactly one button.

You remember the button. The sacred toggle: Game on NBC. Tap. Game on ABC. Tap. Back again. Tap.

Now checking another score feels like navigating airport security. Exit the game. Home screen. Open the right streaming app. Confirm I’m me. Find sports. Find the game. Click in. Wait. And by the time it loads, I’ve missed too much of both games.

And if I want to go back to the first game? I repeat the pilgrimage. Because nothing says progress like a longer walk to the same couch.

To be fair, the modern TV universe is dazzling. Infinite choices. Every game somewhere. Highlights, stats, alternate angles, documentaries about the long snapper’s childhood goldfish. It’s abundance on a cosmic scale. The problem is that abundance now comes packaged with friction: tiny bureaucracies of clicking and confirming that sit between me and checking in on other options.

Old broadcast TV had limits, but it respected momentum. It didn’t ask who was watching. It just switched the channel.

I’m not giving up streaming. I like choice. I like having every game within reach. I’d just like one honest button again. One small, beautiful shortcut between curiosity and knowing.

Translated into Data

 

Something gets lost when every corner of life becomes optimized, monetized, tracked, and translated into data.

We were promised “smart” everything. What we got was a world that’s constantly trying to convert human existence into a subscription model.

And everybody seems OK with it. 

Not surprising. Human beings will normalize almost anything if you wrap it in convenience. Especially if it arrives with clean branding and free shipping. So now we now carry tracking devices everywhere voluntarily and get annoyed when they only predict half of our desires correctly.

Even creativity gets treated like a branch of logistics. Algorithms decide what music gets heard, what writing gets seen, what paintings get shared, what jokes survive longer than six minutes. The machine doesn’t ask whether something is true or beautiful or even interesting. It asks whether people paused long enough while scrolling on the toilet.

No, I’m not anti-technology. I like being able to find obscure books in thirty seconds. I enjoy GPS that tells me to “go past this light and turn right at the next one.” I’m grateful I can talk to people across oceans instantly … and not pay huge additional fees to do that. But I think something gets lost when every corner of life is targeted for conversion into data to be crunched into information to be used or misused in any variety of applications.

Some of the best parts of life happen when nobody’s measuring them. They remind you that life is supposed to be lived, not continuously processed.

And maybe that’s what I really miss. Not old objects. Not rotary phones or bank books.

I miss a world where living wasn’t a business model and existence wasn’t a revenue stream.

My New TV Career

So I asked ChatGPT what television show I should be on.

I was expecting maybe they'd suggest I'd be a compassionate senior surgeon on "Grey's Anatomy", a savvy Chief of Police on "Law and Order", or perhaps a love interest for Hannah Waddingham on "Ted Lasso". Nope. AI thinks I'm a cowboy.

Chat GPT response: You look like you belong on Yellowstone 🤠 — the rugged beard, weathered face, and easygoing grin give you that Montana rancher energy. You look like the guy who’s been working the ranch for 30 years, knows everybody’s secrets, and isn’t afraid to tell the Dutton family exactly what he thinks!

ChatGPT tends to suck up to its prompter ... so I guess "weathered face and "working the ranch for 30 years" could've been a lot worse.