Every day our world is consumed in darkness. As we approach the winter solstice, the light of our day grows ever shorter. However, there is a solution to this problem: change the clocks. Daylight Saving is the silent guardian of our happy lives and we should protect it. Certainly, I understand the arguments made against Daylight Saving time, the unfortunate difficulty of physical adjustment, for instance, but I think that the benefit provided by the system is so great as to far overshadow the negative effects.

The great benefit of Daylight Saving is elegantly simple and absolutely worth maintaining. I speak only of happiness. Unquestionably, the mornings of both of the time changes throw off your schedule and affect your sleep, but that is only two days out of the entire year. Daylight Saving is about more than those two days; you just don’t notice the benefit the rest of the time.

Daylight Saving as it exists now is meant to accomplish one important goal: to give you another hour of sunlight. Now, altering your clocks obviously does not change how long the sun stays in the sky, but it does change the amount of time it remains visible in the sky. If we did not push our clocks an hour forward in the spring, we would have another hour of sunlight in the morning rather than in the evening. This choice, however, would be intrinsically worse for nearly everyone. The everyday American spends his morning waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and commuting to work or school.

This part of your day would not be altogether improved by extra sunlight, certainly not to the extent that your evening is improved by the current approach. With Daylight Saving, your extra hour of sunlight is not used to brighten your house while you sleep, or illuminate your boring drive to work, instead it is used to brighten your afterwork beach party, or illuminate your evening jog. Daylight Saving gives you the opportunity to spend more time doing the activities you love, instead of wasting that sunlight on brushing your teeth in the morning.

Daylight Saving is about letting people have more sunlight for the items that need it. We are all made happier when we get to spend more time doing what we enjoy, and Daylight Saving accomplishes this and eliminating it would shorten our fun alongside the day. Instead of suggesting getting rid of this wonderful feature of our lives, perhaps we should make it year round.