Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It’s that time of year again — when we all pretend to be masters of time itself, dutifully obeying an old government decree born out of war and oil rations. Twice a year, we engage in this strange ritual known as “clock touching,” as if fiddling with our microwaves and car dashboards could somehow save the planet. It’s a vestige of a bygone era, a little wartime relic we’ve never quite managed to shake off, like ration books or the phrase “duck and cover.”

“Spring forward, fall back,” they say, as if that makes it any less ridiculous. In March we lose an hour, in November we get one back — a temporal yo-yo that confuses pets, babies, and the elderly alike. Supposedly, this all began to save fuel oil during the war, though it’s unclear how setting my alarm back an hour in 2025 will help the troops. Still, every year, like clockwork — pun fully intended — we comply.

And so, on November 2nd at precisely 2:00 a.m., a time that feels arbitrarily plucked from a hat, we’re told to roll out of bed and twist our clocks back an hour. Of course, no one actually does this. We all lie there in bed pretending we’ll remember in the morning, then spend the next day wondering why our phone is smarter than we are.

The only real winners in this annual absurdity are the bars — those noble institutions of nocturnal fellowship that stop serving at 2 a.m. For one magical night each fall, they are gifted an extra hour of tipsy revelry. When the clock strikes two, it suddenly becomes one again, and the jukebox keeps playing. Somewhere, a bartender smiles.

Meanwhile, the rest of us stumble through the next week in a fog of misplaced circadian rhythm, unsure if we’ve gained or lost time — or just our patience. But we’ll do it again come spring, because that’s what we do. We spring forward, we fall back, and we pretend that moving the hands of a clock can somehow move the world.