[Affric]

Yeah, being awoken by an alarm in pure darkness is grim which, longitude 15 solar noon minutes west of where our timezone is set and at our latitude is very possible in winter.

With pure standard time we would never have sunset before 5 pm but daylight savings puts half the year's 7 am before the sun has risen, and if you are an early riser as I have become, before the dawn breaks.

It also gives us four months where it's very hard to get children to sleep after 8 pm and for me it's even hard to start winding down.

I think summer time is really non-optimal for most purposes, changing the clocks sucks, and most individuals that work do so for too many hours a day. It's a local maximum in terms of how we socially manage time and people mistake optimising our society towards it to be optimising towards a global maximum.

Imagine if there was no DST and someone said "let's change every clock...", I would think it's a classic XY problem.

[postalrat]

It sucks when it's dark outside at 4:30 pm. That means many people don't even see much of the sun during the work week.

[Affric]

I have lived at high latitudes and agree; funnily enough around that time of year fog and cloud cover often meant no sun even if you were out during the day, records of 62 days with no sight of the sun. Crushing stuff.

But the situation you describe is literally not physically possible where I currently live due to proximity to the equator and being west of the line of longitude our clock runs on during standard time, but DST demands we wake up in darkness.

How the workday in the modern economy is fundamentally unjust. You shouldn't have to sign away your ability to see the sun for a job (unless at extremely high latitudes or extreme weather conditions).