No light, no water, no plan: you cry if you don't laugh in Iran's summer
Firsthand reports from contributors inside Iran
My sister sent me a satirical video last night: someone joking that instead of adjusting the clocks for daylight saving, Iran's government is dragging 85 million people back and forth. It hit a nerve.
She and her husband both work in the public sector. They now have to work from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. as the government forces offices to shut down during peak heat hours to curb electricity use.“The people making these decisions think everyone owns a car or can afford rideshare every day,” she said. “Most of us rely on buses. Not everyone lives within 30 minutes of work. For us, the commute is at least an hour. It’s exhausting.”
To be at work by 6, they wake at 4:30. The metro is too far, so they rely on buses, which now begin service only slightly earlier—at 5:30 a.m. Their children’s school hasn’t changed its start time to match, and nurseries don’t open before 7:30, leaving working parents stuck in the dark—literally and figuratively.
From 1991 to 2022, Iran observed daylight saving time. But then the conservative-led parliament repealed the law, claiming it caused confusion and disrupted the economy. The government tried to reverse course with an urgent bill, but parliament blocked it.So we are stuck with fixed clocks—just as we are with the incompetent bunch ruling, and ruining, our country.
Blackouts are now a daily affair. They’ve hit businesses, factories, homes—even as the Supreme Leader declared this the “Year of Investment for Production.”Images of producers burning heaps of spoiled eggs due to outages have gone viral, along with photos of diesel generators lined up outside homes and shops.
“You cry if you don’t laugh,” my sister says. “Most people who post or see these images on social media are raging inside.”
The minor schedule tweaks in cities like Tehran haven’t helped much, and conditions are even worse in smaller towns. Many schools still refuse to shift their hours, creating logistical nightmares for parents juggling long commutes and childcare.
Then there’s the water crisis.We live in a four-story building where water pressure has dropped so much that the upper floors barely receive any.Officials now warn that by summer 2025, apartments above the second floor will face complete water cuts unless they install electric pumps. But with power outages so frequent, even that solution is flawed.
In practice, this means residents on lower floors get by, while those higher up are left dry. Once again, the burden has shifted to the public.
More than 40 cities across Iran are under water stress, according to official figures. Millions are affected—and occasionally insulted by clerics pontificating about the link between drought and sin.
“The government can’t be blamed for lack of rain,” my brother-in-law interjects as he walks past the sofa my sister and I are slumped on.
“To be fair, it can’t be blamed for worn-out infrastructure either, or for sanctions, or the failure to coordinate and communicate basic schedules. It has just one job: to make your lives miserable. And that it’s performed to perfection if your faces lit by your phones’ glow are any measure.”